Deloitte acquires Sentek and TransientX to beef up cybersecurity

Deloitte today announced it has acquired two companies, Sentek Global and TransientX, in a bid to bolster its secure networking and cyber remediation product offerings. Deloitte said the deals, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, will add Sentek’s and TransientX’s employees and technologies to Deloitte’s existing offerings, services, and solutions.

Cyber threats to all organizations, particularly U.S. federal agencies, continue to proliferate. In 2018, federal agencies reported 13,107 cybersecurity incidents, and the following year, the U.S. government accounted for 5.6% of data breaches and 2.1% of all exposed records. At the same time, organizations are modernizing their environments to deal with evolving business models and IT ecosystems. They’re typically shifting from perimeter-centricity models to a risk-based, zero trust approach that enforces the concept of least privilege.

Deloitte’s purchase of Sentek is in response to this first trend — increased government cyberattacks. A San Diego, California-based systems engineering and cybersecurity firm, Sentek serves the U.S. Navy and Department of Defense, also providing cybersecurity, program management, and integrated logistics services to undisclosed customers in “defense, security, and justice.”

Mike Canning, U.S. government and public services industry leader and principal at Deloitte, says the acquisition will expand Deloitte’s presence in San Diego while supporting its “mission-focused” offerings to military branches and federal agencies.

Sentek CEO and founder Eric Basu added in a press release: “Sentek Global and Deloitte share many common values, not the least of which is providing high-quality services and solutions for the agencies that serve our country. We are joining Deloitte to help our government clients solve complex systems engineering and cybersecurity challenges while also accelerating the scaling of our services for defense, security, and justice sector organizations.”

TransientX

Complementing the Sentek deal, Deloitte’s TransientX acquisition is aimed at expanding the consultancy’s reach in a zero trust security market anticipated to be worth $59.43 billion by 2028. Notably, this is Deloitte’s fourth cyber acquisition in 2021, preceded by the buyouts of Root9B, CloudQuest, and risk protection company Terbium Labs.

“Zero trust transformation is not easy. We created TransientX to help organizations adopt zero trust network access in a flexible, frictionless, and expansive manner across a variety of use cases. In joining Deloitte, we’ll be able to offer our novel approach to [zero trust] in a way that improves security for remote work and vendor collaboration,” TransientX founder and CEO Egemen Tas said in a statement.

Based in Hoboken, New Jersey, TransientX offers a product that connects local apps on devices to its servers, using isolated overlay networks built for individual users. Devices, managed or unmanaged, are never trusted or given direct access to corporate networks. Moreover, granular access control policies, visibility into app usage, and microcontainers isolate trusted apps and provide connectivity independent of the underlying physical network topology.

Deborah Golden, risk and financial advisory cyber and strategic risk leader and principal at Deloitte, said in a press release: “Our cyber practice acquisition strategy … is squarely focused on hyper-scaling to support our own services and solutions delivery, as well as to transform the way we help our clients build cyber resilience, enable agile operations, and promote more resilient security practices. Acquiring TransientX’s business will help Deloitte truly differentiate how it delivers to the market by infusing [new] capabilities into a broad portfolio of products and services.”