Suridata Buy Adds SaaS Posture Management to Fortinet SASE

Fortinet purchased a SaaS security posture management startup led by a former Deloitte and EY executive to bolster visibility, control and governance across SaaS stacks.

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The Silicon Valley-based platform security vendor said its acquisition of Tel Aviv, Israel-based Suridata will tackle rising threats in SaaS-heavy environments such as misconfigurations, identity abuse and third-party risks. The deal will help Fortinet add SSPM to its unified Secure Access Service Edge platform, and address the escalating complexity and risk profile of modern SaaS environments, the company said.

“As organizations accelerate their adoption of cloud-first, SaaS-heavy environments, the perimeter has shifted – and so have the threats,” Fortinet wrote in a blog post Thursday. “The growing complexity of SaaS ecosystems introduces new risks tied to misconfigurations, identity misuse and uncontrolled third-party integrations.”

Suridata, founded in 2020, employs 37 people and has raised $11.5 million in two rounds of outside funding, having most recently received $9 million in seed funding in March 2022 from New Era Capital Partners. The company has been led since inception by Lee Kappon, who previously spent two years at Deloitte as an innovation leader in natural language processing and two years in EY’s high-tech practice.

As organizations increasingly adopt a cloud-first, SaaS-heavy model, Fortinet said cybercriminals are pivoting their methods from exploiting vulnerabilities to leveraging stolen credentials. Rather than rely on traditional breach tactics, Fortinet said attackers now favor identity-based intrusions where they can simply log in using credentials obtained via phishing, leaks, or combo lists of usernames and passwords (see: Fortinet Acquires Unicorn Lacework to Enhance Cloud Security).

“Suridata’s SaaS Security Posture Management solution bridges the visibility and control gap across SaaS apps, delivering continuous monitoring, risk assessment and policy enforcement – all of which are essential to a modern SASE strategy,” Fortinet wrote in its blog. The company declined to make an executive available to Information Security Media Group for an interview.

What Makes Suridata’s Approach to SaaS Security Unique

Suridata provides the lens through which enterprises can understand and continuously evaluate their SaaS stack, not just in terms of what apps are present, but how they’re configured, who is using them and what data they expose. Suridata offers real-time detection and automated policy enforcement, both of which are essential for staying ahead of threats that exploit permissions or configuration drift.

Suridata extends visibility to Okta and Microsoft Entra ID, along with third-party integrations, service accounts and even non-human identities such as automation bots and API connections. This enables end-to-end identity threat protection, tying identity behavior to application usage and helping security teams enforce least-privilege access, monitor privilege escalation and revoke unsafe access in real time.

Generative AI tools embedded in SaaS platforms present new and poorly understood security risks related to data exposure, intellectual property leakage and plugin abuse. Suridata’s SSPM platform offers AI-specific visibility and control, detecting unauthorized plugin usage, monitoring data flow into generative AI workflows and enabling automated revocation of unsafe or unapproved integrations, Fortinet said.

“Misconfigurations, shadow IT and overly permissive access rights create dangerous blind spots that attackers increasingly exploit,” Fortinet wrote in its blog.

Suridata emphasizes capabilities such as automated remediation, security workflows and real-time threat correlation to reduce human workload, minimize dwell time and enable rapid incident response. The firm envisions a single-pane-of-glass approach to SaaS posture management, centralizing monitoring, policy enforcement and risk mitigation under one operational framework aligned to global standards.

“The platform automates detection of vulnerabilities like misconfigurations and shadow SaaS applications, offers real-time threat correlation across interconnected systems, maps potential attack paths and enables proactive remediation through automated workflows or manual interventions while maintaining operational continuity,” Fortinet wrote in its blog.

This is Fortinet’s fourth acquisition in the past year and comes less than six months after the company bought email and collaboration security provider Perception Point for $33.7 million. In August 2024, Fortinet purchased insider risk management and data loss prevention provider Next DLP for $105 million as well as cloud-native application protection platform Lacework for $152.3 million.