AWS Acquires Sqrrl

What secrecy is this! Amazon Web Services has acquired Sqrrl, a security startup that is said to have NSA roots, with the founders previously having worked for the US National Security Agency.

This development comes hot on the heels of AWS announcing the formation of a secret region of datacenters meant to handle computing and data storage workloads from intelligence agencies in the United States.

The company has posted a message on hits homepage, saying:

“We will be joining the Amazon Web Services family, and we’re looking forward to working together on customer offerings for the future.”

That said, the news of Amazon showing an interest in this buyout was no secret, as reports had surfaced that the company was in advanced talks to buy Sqrrl. The deal was said to be somewhere in the range of $40 million and above, though the terms were not disclosed.

Sqrrl has deep ties to the NSA, both its team and underlying technology.

Companies have been using the Sqrrl software to pick up on existing threats, with the company making a note of its prowess in a datasheet:

“Sqrrl consumes and fuses diverse security datasets, including network traffic logs, DNS logs, proxy data, user directory and identity information, external intelligence feeds, and customer transactions. Sqrrl uses this data to reveal suspicious behaviors, pinpoint the actors involved, and assess an organization’s risk exposure.”

How Amazon will integrate this technology with its cloud platform remains a mystery for now.

But AWS has sought to enhance its cloud in the past with a range of security tools. Most recently, the cloud giant announced Amazon Macie, which was based on technology from a startup that it had acquired, called Harvest.ai.

Expect something similar here.