Months after their separation from Intel, firewall giants McAfee have acquired cloud security startup Skyhigh Networks. Sources say that this deal is a ploy to beef up McAfee’s cloud security and add more clients to their roster. The cost of acquisition was not announced but estimates pegged Skyhigh’s valuation at USD 400M, with the startup having raised over USD 106M in a series- D round of funding from Sequoia, Greylock and Salesforce last year.

Reflecting on the acquisition, Chris Young, CEO of McAfee commented:

Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five years ago to realize that cybersecurity for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption. They pioneered an entirely new product category called cloud access security broker (CASB) that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years – where Skyhigh continues to innovate and lead. Skyhigh’s leadership in cloud security, combined with McAfee’s security portfolio strength, will set the company apart in helping organizations operate freely and securely to reach their full potential.

Sources also speculate the chances of McAfee investing in Skyhigh’s business since all is quiet on the funding front.

Echoing the views of CEO Young, Skyhigh CEO Rajiv Gupta said:

Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realizing Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business. McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.

Readers feel that the nature of this deal is in line with the current trend of consolidation where a bigger fish is acquiring smaller counterparts in the ecosystem to provide more services under one umbrella. The deal is set to be sealed after a regulatory approvals and clearances.