SolarWinds is on the acquisition trail again – this time confirming the acquisition of Trusted Metrics, a real-time threat monitoring and management software provider.

The acquisition will enable SolarWinds to release a new security product under the name of SolarWinds Threat Monitor, which is an automated tool which aims to make threat detection easier for IT operations teams, managed service providers and managed security service providers.

As regular readers of this publication will testify, organisations’ cloud initiatives are becoming ever-more complex – and with that, the security factor goes up significantly. Alex Bennett, of Firebrand Training, noted security as the number one skill businesses and employees need to know in 2018 back in May, while new security snafus are rarely out of the news.

Writing for this publication in May, Srivats Ramaswami, CTO at 42Q, cited manufacturing as an industry where cloud security needed to be taken more seriously. “Remember, the best application providers and data centres have large, dedicated security teams who have implemented automated threat monitoring systems that operate 24×7,” he wrote. “In the end, the best cloud software companies have dedicated more time, resources and budget to securing our systems than most organisations are able to provide themselves.”

This makes for interesting reading when it compares to what SolarWinds are attempting to do. The new product, utilising the technology of Trusted Metrics, will aim to aggregate a plethora of data sources, such as asset data, security events, and network intrusion detection, and correlate it with continuously updated threat intelligence to ‘identify the danger signals amidst all the innocent noise of a normal network.’

“The acquisition of Trusted Metrics will allow us to offer a new product in the SolarWinds mould – powerful, easy to use, scalable – that is designed to give businesses the ability to more easily protect IT environments and business operations,” said Kevin Thompson, SolarWinds CEO in a statement.

The move complements the company’s acquisition of software as a service provider Loggly, announced at the start of this year.