Cisco Logo
Cisco LogoReuters

Cisco's announcement expressing its intent to acquire CloudLock, a cyber security company, for $293 million on Tuesday comes as a logical extension of the company's acqusiition of other two cloud-computing companies this year, namely CliQr Technologies and Synata.

The acquisition comprises $293 million in cash, "assumed equity awards" and retention-based incentives to CloudLock's employees, who are set to join Cisco's security team led by Cisco's senior vice president and general manager David Goeckeler, as disclosed in by Cisco in a press release.

With the latest acquisition, Cisco hopes to scale up its security architecture for a range of products in its portfolio while marketing each product separately, Goeckeler was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal.

The networking company highlights that CloudLock's specialisation in cloud security broker technology (CASB) will help its B2B customers to monitor and control user behaviour across cloud platforms to protect security of data, especially the confidential kind, handled via cloud. The acquisition is expected to complete by the first quarter of 2017.

"As companies are migrating to the cloud, they need a technology partner that can accelerate that transition and deliver critical security capabilities for all their users, apps and data in a seamless way," said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development

According to Cisco, the acquisition could strengthen its security portfolio and enable its customers across 13 different sectors to secure their employees' cloud applications whether or not such applications are approved or sanctioned by their respective IT department. This applies to applications deployed in off-the-shelf cloud services such as Google, Workday, Drop box or custom made cloud applications built on Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure.

CloudLock was founded as Aprigo in 2007 by three Israelis — Gil Zimmermann, Ron Zalkind and Tsahy Shapsa — and has 143 employees. The company, which claims to disrupt enterprise cloud security market, raised $35 million (when) Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce's venture funds and Ascent Venture Partners last year, says Fortune.