France-based technology company Thales has announced that it completed the acquisition of US-based cybersecurity company Imperva . Completed earlier than foreseen (at the beginning of 2024), the acquisition comes as a milestone for Thales, creating a global cybersecurity company with over 5,800 cybersecurity experts across 68 countries and EUR 2.4 billion in cybersecurity revenue expected in 2024, including civil and defence activities.

The transaction is believed to generate increased value creation for Thales’ shareholders, aligned with the targets communicated in July 2023, when the acquisition was first announced. Thales’ acquisition of Imperva and what it entails for cybersecurity Thales officials commented on the announcement stating that the acquisition of the US-based Imperva marks a new step in the expansion of Thales’ global cybersecurity capabilities for enterprises and governments around the world. The combination of their entities’ values and joint commitment to a future of trust is thought to create significant synergies, business opportunities, and market innovations.

With cyber threats against business and government digital infrastructure ever-increasing, Thales is now positioned to help customers protect their digital ecosystem, ranging from applications, data, and identities. Thales and Imperva together will assist customers in addressing cybersecurity challenges that have rapidly grown in frequency, severity, and complexity, with comprehensive solutions for an extensive range of application, data security, and identity use cases. Combined, these three market segments are forecasted to increase significantly in the years to come, with analysts projecting worldwide end-user spending to total approximately USD 20 billion in 2024.

Following Imperva’s addition, Thales’ expanded cybersecurity portfolio now provides a complementary combination of solutions to help customers secure applications, data, and identities across their entire digital ecosystem: Application Security: unified protection for each application and API in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid model. The product suite includes a Web Application Firewall (WAF), Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) Protection, advanced bot protection, API security, a developer-friendly Content Delivery Network (CDN), and Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP). Data Security: protection and control of access to sensitive data. The product suite includes the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, Imperva Data Security Fabric, as well as the Luna and payShield Hardware Security Modules, often used as the root of trust for cryptographic operations. Identity and access management: simplified, secure, and trusted access to applications and digital services for customers, employees, and partners.

The product suite includes the OneWelcome Identity Platform and SafeNet Trusted Access. The announcement further highlights that the acquisition comes as Thales’ ninth one in the digital security industry in the past nine years, as well as the largest one in the company’s history after Gemalto, a leader in digital security. After the completed acquisitions of Tesserent, a cybersecurity player in Australia, S21sec & Excellium, players in cybersecurity consulting, integration, and managed services in Europe, and OneWelcome, a European company in customer identity and access management, the integration of Imperva within Thales is believed to position the Group’s cybersecurity business as amongst the top in cybersecurity.

.