SEP portfolio company, Zeus Technology, have recently announced it has purchased the assets of art of defence, a German-based distributed web application firewall (dWAF) provider.

Zeus’ acquisition of art of defence is in direct response to the increased demand to protect web applications from security threats exacerbated by cloud deployment. Zeus Application Firewall Module, built on technology licensed from art of defence since May 2009, protects web applications on premise, or in the cloud against known and unknown attacks at the application layer and helps to provide PCI-DSS compliance. Both Zeus and art of defence technologies have been designed to run on any virtualization or cloud platform – unlike legacy hardware-based solutions – making the two product sets a perfect fit.

This acquisition strengthens Zeus’ position as a leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure ensuring that organizations have a complete, integrated, solution for accelerating, securing and scaling their business-critical applications.

“After partnering with art of defence for several years, we are excited to take the next step in fully integrating the industry’s most robust dWAF into our platform,” said Jim Darragh, CEO of Zeus Technology. “Like Zeus, art of defence is focused on providing customers with solutions that meet the needs of dynamic virtual and cloud environments. By coming together, we can ensure we continue to push the pace of innovation for our customers, while providing them with the best support team.”

Zeus Application Firewall Module will help online businesses by providing compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), a requirement that regulates how organizations process, transmit or store credit card information. Zeus Application Firewall Module identifies and classifies transactions as well as encrypts and seals information, to protect against unauthorized access and securely handles non-permitted requests so they never reach the application and are logged for audit purposes.