Machine data analytics giant Splunk Inc. today announced that it will acquire Phantom Cyber Inc., a rising star in the security industry, for $350 million.

The deal is set to provide a handsome return for the startup’s investors. Phantom has raised $22.7 million from a group that included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and In-Q-Tel, a fund associated with the U.S. intelligence community.

The hefty large premium that Splunk has agreed to pay is a reflection of the value that it sees in the startup’s technology. Phantom offers a security automation platform used at companies such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Rackspace Inc. to protect their systems from hacking. The software acts as a sort of command center, coordinating an organization’s existing network protection tools to allow for more effective defense.

The linchpin of Phantom’s platform is an editor that enables administrators to create automated workflows for handling security incidents. If a threat intelligence service that a company relies on flags a certain IP address as malicious, for example, the software can automatically configure the internal firewall to block it.

Phantom provides the ability to create similar policies for handling breaches. An administrator can configure the platform to trigger when internal threat detection platform finds a malware infection, terminate the affected process and notify security personnel about the incident. Phantom says that its software allows companies to automate a wide range of similar scenarios.

The platform falls into a category that Gartner Inc. refers to as the Security Orchestration, Automation and Response segment. The research firm projects adoption of SOAR tools to grow from one percent to 15 percent of network protection teams with more than five members by 2021.

After completing the acquisition of Phantom, Splunk should be in a much stronger position to tap this growth. The transaction will bolster the company’s existing lineup of security tools, which consists of plugins for its flagship data analytics platform that can help with the detection of security breaches and fraud.

Splunk expects to complete the Phantom deal in the first half of 2018. The startup’s team will report to Splunk senior vice president and general manager of security markets Haiyan Song, who is a repeat guest on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio. She most recently dropped by during Splunk’s annual customer conference in September:

Image: Splunk