Microsoft continues buying spree, acquires Israeli information protection company Secure Islands

Microsoft has been an acquisition monster lately, buying up apps like Wunderlist and Sunrise, fleshing out its mobile AI capabilities with Mobile Data Labs, and pumping up its CRM portfolio with Adxstudio. Today, Microsoft is announcing an addition to its data protection offerings with its purchase of Secure Islands.
Data security is clearly a hot topic today. Data breaches have hit everyone from the government to private organizations to companies like Target, T-Mobile, and many, many more. Securing data is made more difficult by the need to share data outside of an organization’s own information technology infrastructure, creating the need to protect data even when its outside of a given organization’s control.
Data protection technology provider Secure Islands is focused on protecting just this kind of data. From Microsoft’s blog:

Businesses continue to face challenges protecting their data in a world where information travels beyond the boundary of the corporate network and across many devices outside company control. To work effectively, organizations must share information with partners, vendors and customers. These realities make it more critical than ever to have solutions that prevent data loss and track information regardless of where it resides.
Based in Israel, Secure Islands provides powerful data classification, protection and loss prevention technologies for virtually any type of file, which allows customers to apply data protection to more applications. Global customers, such as UBS, OSRAM, Vodafone and Credit Suisse, use and trust Secure Islands to protect data at each stage of the information lifecycle – from creation to sharing.

Secure Islands’ technology will be integrated with Azure Rights Management Service to work alongside the data classification capabilities of Office 365 and Windows. Secure Islands CEO Aki Eldar also had some words on the merging of his company within the giant company from Redmond:

By joining Microsoft, we will be able to extend and expand our vision. Microsoft has been a long time partner and its leadership in enterprise IT, its resources and global reach will help us innovate and deliver new information protection capabilities to both our current and new customer base.

Microsoft is transitioning from the Windows platform company to a “cloud-first, mobile-first” strategy, and acquisitions like this are just one of the tactics they’re using to dramatically transform themselves. We’ll be keeping an eye on how the company continue to meld itself into a competitive giant going forward.