Zeus acquires Art of Defence

Zeus Technology, a company offering application management and delivery software, recently announced that they were acquiring Art of Defence, a German-based distributed web application firewall (dWAF) provider. The company has been offering a popular security/firewall module developed by art of defence for quite some time (since May 2009).

During my conversation with Zeus, I asked why purchase Art of Defence now. The answer was pragmatic and made a great deal of sense. A good number of Zeus' biggest customers were using the art of defense technology, liked it and wanted integrated into Zeus' product at a deeper level. Zeus thought it best to acquire the assets of Art of Defence and improve the communication between development teams.

When I asked why Zeus thought this acquisition would benefit its customers, Zeus pointed out that the security/firewall module was designed to protect web applications on premise, or in the cloud against known and unknown attacks at the application layer and helps customers with PCI-DSS compliance.

It is likely that Zeus had another thought in mind as well — increasing the company's presense in Germany. The Art of Defence’s Regensburg-based headquarters is becoming Zeus’ official German operation headed up by Art of Defence’s two founders Georg Hess, CEO and Alexander Meisel, CTO. All Art of Defence’s staff will transition into Zeus’ new German operating company. In addition to being integrated into the Zeus portfolio, Art of Defence’s anchor hyperguard™ product line will continue to be offered as standalone product.

Since security is an ongoing concern for customers, it is likely that adding art of defense's technology to Zeus' portfolio will allow Zeus to continue to serve its customers' needs.