Hot on the heels of introducing new “autonomous” services that can tune and update themselves, Oracle Corp. is once again bolstering its cloud platform, this time through an acquisition.

The database maker today announced that it has inked an agreement to buy Zenedge Inc., a four-year-old developer of cloud security tools backed by about $14 million in venture capital. The startup’s flagship Zenedge Cybersecurity Suite helps defend some 800,000 online services and corporate networks from online threats.

At the heart of the offering is a hosted firewall that the startup said uses machine learning to distinguish malicious traffic from legitimate requests. Zenedge routes the traffic directed toward customers’ services through the platform to filter any packets that may contain a malicious payload. In the process, the startup also blocks bots and distributed denial-of-service attacks that seek to knock a web service offline.

According to Oracle, Zenedge has helped an unnamed “major airline” fend off over a million malicious requests per day. A large media conglomerate in turn saw its site loading times improve by 30 percent after filtering bot traffic with the startup’s platform.

Rounding out the Zenedge Cybersecurity Suite is a tool for protecting a company’s application programming interfaces. If an organization wishes to make a backend business system reachable from an employee app, for example, the startup’s platform can ensure that the API is not accessible for hackers. Zenedge does so by enabling companies to assign a cryptographic identifier to each application that relies on the API and automatically block requests from unverified sources.

The technology will complement not only Oracle’s cloud platform but also its Domain Name System capabilities. The database maker entered the DNS market in November 2016 by acquiring Dyn Inc., which was hit by a massive cyberattack the month before the deal that temporary left large parts of the Internet inaccessible. Zenedge’s DDoS prevention features can mitigate the impact of such incidents. 

As was the case after with the Dyn deal, Oracle has not shared how much it has agreed to pay for Zenedge. The acquisition comes just three months after the company entered a $1.19 billion agreement to buy Aconex Ltd., a maker of niche collaboration tools for the construction and engineering industry.

Image: Oracle / CC by 2.0