Mimecast acquires Aware, delivering AI-powered risk management for workplace collaboration tools

Mimecast, a leading global Human Risk Management (HRM) platform, is announcing its acquisition of Aware, a leading AI collaboration security platform. Targeting the challenges of human-based risk in the enterprise, this acquisition  merges the powers of Mimecast and Aware to deliver AI-powered risk management.

“In the modern digital workplace, businesses’ most critical data and communications live online. While email and collaboration platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams are key to keeping people connected and productive, they also pose significant risks to organizations,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, CEO of Mimecast. "The human attack surface has expanded significantly, and legacy tools weren’t built to understand the complexity of messages, @mentions, emojis, and GIFs. It creates more vulnerability in organizations’ ecosystems, leading to security gaps, blind spots, and missing context, and exposing businesses to the risk of regulatory fines, reputational damage, and loss of valuable intellectual property.”

As van Zadelhoff made clear, the potential risks lurking within the daily processes of enterprise workers cannot go unaddressed. Traditional, legacy risk management tools are ill-equipped to tackle the vulnerabilities hiding within unstructured data—which is where Aware’s purpose-built, targeted AI models shine.

Aware’s advanced, AI-powered capabilities serve to identify risks located within the unstructured data of workplace collaboration tools. Now joining Mimecast’s existing investments in AI models, Aware empowers protection against sensitive data loss associated with human risk.

“Aware was developed to understand, detect, and mitigate human behavior risks in the platforms where people work and collaborate. This forward-thinking approach and AI-powered capabilities will help enable us to further expand our offerings and address the intensifying risk,” van Zadelhoff added.

The acquisition of Aware will enhance Mimecast’s HRM platform, allowing enterprises to secure their unique digital landscapes with AI-based capabilities. Aware seamlessly integrates with some of the most popular workplace collaboration tools, delivering unprecedented visibility within the tools that workers rely on.

“Businesses are facing new, dangerous security threats that reach beyond email to everywhere employees collaborate to get work done. Adding to the expanded attack surface, humans have become the new endpoints and the greatest risk to any business, making critical Aware’s ability to leverage AI to understand context and behavior in conversations, and surface real-time insider threats at scale,” said Jeff Schumann, chief executive officer and co-founder at Aware.

“AI is not a standalone solution that can solve all cybersecurity problems. We believe the true power of AI technology lies in the ability to leverage it to understand the nuanced human element of threats. We’re thrilled to join Mimecast and help customers identify potential issues and opportunities within collaboration, and better protect the collaborative work surface,” continued Schumann.

To learn more about Mimecast’s acquisition of Aware, please visit https://www.mimecast.com/ or https://www.awarehq.com/.