Alert Logic Acquires Critical Watch For Risk, Compliance

Alert Logic acquired Critical Watch in a deal that adds deeper vulnerability and configuration data to its managed security information and event management platform.

Dallas-based Critical Watch sells its agent-based Active Countermeasures Intelligence platform, which connects to network scanners, Web application scanners and other risk assessment tools and collects the vulnerability and configuration data into a central database. The information can then be fed into SIEM systems to add context to the severity of alerts. The security vendor has a range of OEM agreements with a variety of security and technology vendors.

Gray Hall, CEO of Alert Logic, said Critical Watch shares Alert Logic’s cloud-delivery model and provides deeper visibility for Alert Logic’s analytics and correlation engine. In addition to vulnerability assessment, PCI compliance scanning and configuration auditing services, Critical Watch provides defense modeling and countermeasure recommendations when weaknesses are detected.

[Related: MSSPs Find Advanced Threat Services, Incident Response Tied To Log Analysis]

"The integration of the Critical Watch team and their related technologies into the Alert Logic portfolio will enable us to more quickly reach our stated goal of providing outcome-focused security for our customers,’ Hall said in a statement.

Houston-based Alert Logic initially focused on building a customer base consisting of small and midsize businesses, but it has evolved to attract more enterprise accounts, said Brian DiPaolo, the assessment and compliance practice director at Houston-based MSP AccuData Systems. AccuData is certified to conduct assessments for the payment industry and has partnered with Alert Logic for several years. Alert Logic’s technology addresses issues that are resource-intensive for customers and it can be deployed fairly easily.

’There’s been a breadth of activity and organizations in general are becoming much more security-minded and want to take action,’ DiPaolo said in a recent interview. ’It’s been a good addition by helping organizations engage a security solution that provides strong ROI, and you can escalate issues to my operational staff to remediate or take action.’

Alert Logic competes with traditional SIEM vendors and directly against Sumo Logic, which sells a managed SIEM platform with similar capabilities. The company has been gaining attention among managed security service providers that manage the platform on behalf of their clients.

Critical Watch sells FusionVM, which extends the platform’s governance, risk and compliance capabilities for use in MSSP environments. It separates client data and enables security analysts to create and manage multiple clients from one view while giving each client a dashboard of individual reporting metrics.

PUBLISHED JAN. 6, 2015