HPE acquires Cloud Services Identity Management startup Scytale

HPE announced the acquisition of Cloud Security and Cloud Services Identity Management startup Scytale. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 2017, San Francisco based Scytale helps in standardizing authentication mechanisms across cloud, container, and on-premises infrastructures. The company has raised a total of $8 Million in funding over 3 rounds, according to CrunchBase.

The experts from Scytale are the founding members of Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects such as  SPIFFE (the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone) and SPIRE (the SPIFFE Runtime Environment). These projects will possibly become the de facto standards for identifying and securing enterprise workloads across cloud, container, and on-premises infrastructure.  Scytale is built on top of the SPIFFE protocol.

Executive Opinion

In an announcement, HPE Fellow and General Manager, Dave Husak, said, "This acquisition also represents HPE’s ongoing transformation, part of which is to embrace and contribute to open source projects in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and elsewhere. Our goal is to deliver services and products that advance these developments, and provide our customers and partners with the fastest-possible path to application modernization. A great proof-point of this is the recently launched, Kubernetes-Certified HPE Container Platform, derived from our recent acquisitions of MapR (key contributors to a number of Apache Foundation projects) and BlueData."

In a blog-post, co-founder of Scytale, Sunil James said, "Scytale's DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us. We'll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE's plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform. "

HPE Cloud Security and Scytale's Aquisition

Edge-to-cloud architectures demand autonomous, open, and secure experience. The current security models could not scale in API-driven, containerized, dynamic, and spans from the edge-to-cloud environment, notes the announcement.

The SPIFFE and SPIRE projects are becoming the backbone for scalable, seamless service authentication. HPE plans to leverage SPIFFE and SPIRE into its cloud portfolio. HPE also notes that the cryptographic-identity technologies offered by these projects add huge value to enterprise-scale digital transformation, cloud-enablement, and cloud-migration projects.

HPE also noted that it will keep on supported Scytale’s contributions to SPIFFE and SPIRE.