Human risk management platform Mimecast will acquire AI collaboration security platform Aware, which it says will strengthen collaboration security and compliance offerings and accelerate innovation.
“In the modern digital workplace, businesses’ most critical data and communications live online. While email and collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are key to keeping people connected and productive, they also pose significant risks to organizations,” said Mimecast CEO Marc van Zadelhoff.
Aware’s platform and targeted AI models identify the risks found within the unstructured data of workplace collaboration tools and are designed to prevent the loss of sensitive data, improve compliance, and mitigate human risk factors. The company’s advanced AI-powered capabilities strengthen Mimecast’s existing investments in AI models, providing state-of-the-art security and compliance for customers’ digital landscapes, including impersonation detection across collaboration channels such as Zoom, expansion of business email compromise capabilities by incorporating multiple large language models, and enhancement of archiving capabilities to support multiple collaboration channels.
“The human attack surface has expanded significantly, and legacy tools weren’t built to understand the complexity of messages, @mentions, emojis, and GIFs,” added van Zadelhoff. “It creates more vulnerability in organisations’ ecosystems, leading to security gaps, blind spots, and missing context, and exposing businesses to the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and loss of valuable intellectual property. Aware was developed to understand, detect, and mitigate human behaviour risks in the platforms where people work and collaborate. This forward-thinking approach and AI-powered capabilities will help enable us to further expand our offerings and address the intensifying risk.”
“Businesses are facing new, dangerous security threats that reach beyond email to everywhere employees collaborate to get work done,” said Aware CEO Jeff Schumann. “Adding to the expanded attack surface, humans have become the new endpoints and the greatest risk to any business, making critical Aware’s ability to leverage AI to understand context and behaviour in conversations, and surface real-time insider threats at scale. AI is not a standalone solution that can solve all cybersecurity problems. We believe the true power of AI technology lies in the ability to leverage it to understand the nuanced human element of threats. We’re thrilled to join Mimecast and help customers identify potential issues and opportunities within collaboration, and better protect the collaborative worksurface.”
This acquisition follows the unveiling of Mimecast’s HRM platform, and human risk awareness and training offering, Mimecast Engage, and even more recently, the acquisition of Code42 announced last month. Mimecast will continue to maintain and support the existing Aware customer base. Customers can expect to start seeing some of the new technology embedded into Mimecast products in the coming quarters.
