Microsoft announced that it would be acquiring CyberX, a security startup based out of Herzliya-Israel based that focuses specifically on detecting, stopping, and predicting security breaches on internet of things networks and the networks of large industrial organizations. It also helps customers secure devices that are connected to the internet ,with an un-disclosed price tag of $165 million as per the sources.

CyberX delivers continuous monitoring and vulnerability management with zero impact on operational networks. CyberX discovers and displays a complete network map of all your assets, reaching into all areas of production to give you a clear picture of all devices and how they communicate with each other. It integrates with your SOC workflows and existing security stack to provide unified security governance across both IT and IoT and ICS.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is providing breakthrough value to businesses across every vertical, from manufacturing, to energy, to agriculture, to real estate, to healthcare and more. IoT provides real-time insights into assets, enabling businesses to reduce operational expenses, unplanned downtime and unnecessary servicing.

Microsoft’s also betting big on IoT: it’s invested $5 billion into the area in the last couple of years on a wider platform for building - and critically for Azure operating - IoT solutions as part of its larger enterprise push. Security has to be a major cornerstone of that, with too many examples racking up of flaws in poorly built or maintained systems proving to be doorways into wider vulnerabilities across entire networks.

While the benefits of IoT are well established and significant, one of the biggest hurdles for customers is securing IoT devices – both for new digitization initiatives as well as for legacy Operational Technology and industrial control system environments.

Microsoft already provides multi-layer IoT security and IoT security monitoring in Azure, which is being used by thousands of customers in production and has made securely configuring IoT devices possible. And while securely configuring IoT devices is possible, our mission is to simplify IoT and make securing IoT devices easy.

Yet there are still challenges customers have that we seek to solve:

Giving customers visibility into what IoT devices are already connected to their networks.

Managing the security on existing IoT devices (referred to as “brownfield devices”) that have been historically difficult due to a myriad of custom protocols.

Today we are excited to share that Microsoft is acquiring CyberX to help solve these challenges. CyberX will complement the existing Azure IoT security capabilities, and extends to existing devices including those used in industrial IoT, Operational Technology and infrastructure scenarios. With CyberX, customers can discover their existing IoT assets, and both manage and improve the security posture of those devices. With CyberX, customers can see a digital map of thousands of devices across a factory floor or within a building and gather information about their asset profile and vulnerabilities. Gaining this visibility is not only critical for understanding where security risks may exist and then mitigating those risks, but it is also a fundamental step to securely enable smart manufacturing, smart grid and other digitization use cases across production facilities and the supply chain.

The report says, we will continue to deliver more value to our customers as CyberX is further integrated with Microsoft’s broad portfolio of IoT security offerings in threat protection that span users, endpoints, applications, data and more.