Blue Coat to acquire Solera and sweeten network-security story as cyberattacks continue

There’s been lots of investor interest recently in backing startups focused on making IT more secure, at least in part because of the barrage of news of cyberattacks against government agencies and companies, including a defense contractor. Now comes more security investment activity. Blue Coat Systems, a vendor of network gear for security and WAN optimization, is bolstering its hardware and software strategies with the acquisition of Solera Networks.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Among Solera products is a BlackBox Recorder that, true to its name, records all network activity, which analysts can play back after attacks to see what happened. Solera Deepsee software conducts deep-packet inspection to reveal the nature of applications and associated files in play inside a network. It also brings up timelines of suspicious activity, runs analytics and enables integration with other network tools, such as Palo Alto Networks. Dashboards and other visual features are available. Solera also makes appliances that monitor traffic, storage boxes and a virtual appliance available as a VMware virtual machine.

The deal follows news earlier this month of Blue Coat’s acquisition of the SSL product line from Netronome. The thinking behind that deal was to offer enterprises more visibility into both inbound and outbound traffic and apply policy across all traffic, according to a Blue Coat statement.

Also this month, McAfee agreed to pay around $ 389 million for network-security provider Stonesoft.

In the midst of the attention on cybersecurity among other enterprise IT hot spots, it’s not surprising to see vendors rushing to bolt on products and services and then pinging potential customers to promise the solution to their problems (and then announcing sales gains). The real indicator people should be on the lookout for, though, is a drop in cyberattacks, and judging by some recent headlines, that might still be a ways off.