to help customers secure and manage their critical information. To this end, the company has inked definitive agreements to acquire PGP and GuardianEdge Technologies.
Both these companies are privately-held and are well-established in the e-mail and data encryption market. Symantec will acquire PGP for about US$300 million in cash and GuardianEdge for about US$70 million in cash.
Research firm IDC estimates the fast-growing encryption market to reach US$1.7 billion in 2013 and Symantec expects these acquisitions will expand its addressable security market opportunity and also strengthen its position in this industry.
According to Symantec, the two deals are expected to close during the June quarter and are subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. Today, critical information is increasingly becoming used on mobile devices and in the cloud. This has led encryption technology to become an important element of an information-centric security solution.
More companies are driven to encrypt sensitive information and protect an individual’s privacy as both state and national governments are enacting more stringent and costly compliance mandates.
Adoption of encryption has also increased because of the increased costs and frequency of data breaches. Companies are now keener on mitigating risk and protecting their critical information from cyber criminals.
With these acquisitions, Symantec is combining PGP and GuardianEdge’s standards-based encryption capabilities for full-disk, removable media, e-mail, file, folder and smart phone, with Symantec’s endpoint security, data loss prevention and gateway security offerings.