Microsoft today announced the acquisition of BlueTalon, a US-based technology start-up that supplies software to prevent people from accessing certain high-value data that companies keep.
Microsoft did not reveal the financial terms of the deal. BlueTalon was founded in 2013 and was based in Redwood City, California. BlueTalon works with leading Fortune 100 companies to eliminate data security blind spots and gain visibility and control of data. BlueTalon provides a data-centric solution for data access management and auditing across the diverse systems resident in modern data estates.
BlueTalon’s 30 employees are joining Microsoft’s Azure Data Governance group, BlueTalon CEO Eric Tilenius wrote in his own blog post. Pratik Verma is the founder of BlueTalon.
“We began exploring partnership opportunities with various hyperscale cloud providers to better serve our customers, Microsoft deeply impressed us. The Azure Data team was thoughtful and visionary when it came to data governance,” Tilenius wrote.
The acquisition of BlueTalon could help Microsoft’s campaign to get companies feeling more comfortable with the idea of keeping sensitive data in its Azure public cloud, which competes with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, among others.
Microsoft derives revenue when people run the open-source Linux operating system in its cloud, despite its heritage as the maker of proprietary Windows. Microsoft now owns GitHub, a place where developers go to get and contribute to many open-source software projects, CNBC reported.
The software company has also become more active around data storage mechanisms that don’t necessarily involve Microsoft’s own SQL Server database software. Earlier this year Microsoft bought Citus Data, a start-up that specialized in helping companies use the open-source PostgreSQL database.
BlueTalon’s technology works with a variety of systems for storing data, including Hadoop, Spark and PostgreSQL. The software lets people run queries on sensitive data to make observations, while not revealing the actual underlying information.
“This acquisition will enhance our ability to empower enterprises across industries to digitally transform while ensuring right use of data with centralized data governance at scale through Azure,” Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.
