It looks like cybersecurity will continue to remain a central focus for IBM Corp. this year, as the enterprise technology giant today revealed that it’s acquiring Agile 3 Solutions LLC, a San Francisco-based partner focused on helping organizations fight privacy risks.

The company’s flagship offering is a compliance tracking platform to ease the identification and diagnosis of problems that put company data in danger. According to IBM, what sets the platform apart is that it’s geared not toward the security professionals such tools usually target, but rather decision-makers on the business side.

The company sees a big market for Agile 3’s technology. In its acquisition announcement, IBM cited a Gartner study that predicted 80 percent of risk management and security teams will have to report to non-technical executives by 2020. The same report made the bold claim that only 20 percent of the information communicated in the process can be considered “useful by the target audience.”

IBM is apparently so confident that Agile 3’s platform is what the industry needs that it decided to acquire one of its subcontractors, the Bangalore-based Ravy Technologies Pvt. Ltd., as part of today’s acquisition.

Its plan for monetizing the deal consists of two main elements. First, it will integrate the platform into its Guardium data governance toolkit to broaden its risk detection capabilities. Second, the company plans to sell Agile 3’s platform through its security consulting business. IBM could offer customized implementations for large enterprise customers that are tailored to their specific operational requirements and usage preferences.

It’s the latest in a string of recent expansions to IBM’s security business. Previously the company launched a specialized iteration of Watson trained to catch hackers, and shortly before partnered with Carbon Black Inc. to help companies tackle endpoint vulnerabilities. The technology giant claims to have hired about 1,900 security professionals since 2015 as part of the effort.

IBM will need to keep investing heavily in this area if it wants to offset the slowing momentum in its more traditional businesses. Last week, the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report left some investors disappointed in its continuing lackluster revenue growth. But Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter noted that a lot of ground has been gained in security, cloud computing and the other markets that IBM refers to as its “strategic imperatives.”

IBM’s stock price is currently up nearly $4 from where it stood after last week’s earnings call.

Image courtesy of IBM