1Password could soon be start offering endpoint protection thanks to a recent acquisition.
The password manager announced it has bought Kolide for an undisclosed amount. Kolide's small team of 30 employees will merge with 1Password "as as intact team," according to 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner.
Kolide CEO Jason Meller will now be the VP of product at 1Password.
Business security
Given that the rise in hybrid working has meant that organizations are now using a mix of personal and work-issued devices, securing these devices is more important than ever. Shiner believes that "most organizations don’t have a good handle on how to secure access to their applications and data on those devices."
However, he believes that "Kolide is the only company in the market with this kind of device security and contextual access management solution that can check the health status of a device at the point of authentication in real time before granting access to company applications.”
Kolide can offer alerts and solutions to endpoint security concerns via Slack, as well as provide self-help tools to deal with such issues on Mac, Windows and Linux devices. There is also a privacy center, where users can see what data is being sent to Kolide.
It is built on the open source project Osquery, an operating system instrumentation framework that allows for low-level analytics of endpoints. It was created by Facebook, but it now forms part of the Linux Foundation.
It already had some big-name customers, including 1Password themselves, as well Databricks, Robinhood, Anduril, and the messaging app Discord.
The merger seems to be following a recent trend of password managers adding more security services to their products. For instance, Dashlane recently launched an anti-phishing tool, and NordPass introduced a new email masking feature to help protect user privacy.
