Netskope is looking to the next generation of cloud security with the acquisition of Sift Security.

The acquisition, which closed in June, will see Sift's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) breach detection and visualisation tool Cloud Hunter move into Netskope's Security Cloud offering.

"By bringing Sift Security into our 'one cloud' architecture, we will take Netskope for IaaS (and as a result, the entire Netskope Security Cloud) to a new level," wrote Sanjay Beri, Netskope CEO, in a blog post confirming the news. "Sift enhances our ability to uniquely gather and visualise the richest set of contextualised data about transactions. This rich contextual data informs nearly all of the services provided by the Netskope Security Cloud.

"Sift Security helped pioneer this for IaaS by ingesting and creating a rich set of data from public cloud infrastructure," added Beri. "This data, which ranges from information around the OS to the networking to the application and user level, enables Sift to correlate, visualise, detect, and remediate threats and incidents in IaaS services."

Neil King, CEO of Sift, will join Netskope's IaaS division to lead product strategy and management. "Four years ago we set out to build a security solution that could detect, correlate, visualise and automatically respond to threats in infrastructure as a service environments like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform," said King. "We're excited to combine those capabilities into the market-leading Netskope Security Cloud."

The move puts more emphasis on the key trend of automated cloud security tools. While the concept has been around for some time, increasingly complex cloud workloads has made the need for automated 'threat hunting' tools more evident. As a McAfee report put it in April, it's all about visibility and control for admins.

While Netskope is beefing up its cloud and IaaS security credentials with the acquisition of Sift,  the company's ambitions are much wider. As this publication reported last year when Netskope secured a $100 million series E funding round, the next step was to take the cloud platform and bring it to the whole web.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.