Symantec confirms acquisition of PGP, winner of SC Magazine's information security vendor of the year

Symantec has made major moves this week to strengthen its product portfolio with the acquisition of both PGP and GuardianEdge.

Under the terms of the agreements, Symantec will acquire PGP for a purchase price of approximately $300 million in cash and GuardianEdge for a purchase price of approximately $70 million in cash. Earlier this week PGP was named as information security vendor of the year at the SC awards, and also won best encryption solution for PGP Whole Disk Encryption and the innovation award for PGP Portable.



The agreements are subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and are expected to be completed during the June quarter. Upon close of the acquisitions, PGP and GuardianEdge will join the Symantec Enterprise Security Group led by senior vice president Francis deSouza.

The acquisitions will see Symantec establish itself firmly in the encryption sector. It claimed that by bringing together PGP and GuardianEdge's standards-based encryption capabilities for full-disk, removable media, email, file, folder and smartphone, with Symantec's endpoint security, data loss prevention and gateway security offerings, Symantec will have the broadest set of integrated data protection solutions.

Following the close of these transactions, Symantec intends to bring together key features and functionality from each company's offerings and standardise on the PGP key management platform in order to deliver centralised policy and key management capabilities across the entire suite of encryption solutions.

Symantec also confirmed that it intends to integrate the PGP key management platform into its Symantec Protection Center, which simplifies security information management by providing customers consolidated access to threat, security and operational dashboards and reporting.

It also said that integrating the PGP key management platform into the Symantec Protection Center will further enhance the management of endpoint security, data loss prevention and gateway security products, which are also integrated with Symantec Protection Center, allowing customers to more seamlessly protect information.

DeSouza said: “As information becomes increasingly mobile, it's essential to take an information-centric approach to security. With these acquisitions we can further protect information by using encryption in an intelligent and policy-driven way to give the right users access to the right information, enabling the trust that individuals and organisations need to operate confidently in an information-driven world.”

Source: scmagazineuk.com


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