Cloud security company Qualys has announced an agreement to acquire TotalCloud, the cloud workflow management and no-code automation platform.

Qualys says the acquisition will strengthen its cloud security solution and allow customers to build user-defined workflows for custom policies. Customers can then execute the policies on-demand for simplified security and compliance.

To implement workflows in a multi-cloud environment, users drag and drop component blocks to build a flow of actions to achieve a particular output, such as compliance checks or remediation.

"With the accelerating adoption of cloud technologies, organisations are looking for new ways to simplify cloud security visibility and remediation with easy to automate workflows," says Qualys president and CEO, Sumedh Thakar.

"The acquisition of TotalCloud will allow Qualys to bring visual cloud remediation workflow technology to the Qualys Cloud Platform, underscoring our continued innovation in Cloud Security.

"We are excited to welcome TotalCloud employees, including its founder Pradeep Kumar, to the Qualys family," he says.

With the vast numbers and varied behaviours of APIs involved in multi-cloud environments, it becomes hard for customers to build in automation to control security, utilisation, inventory, and remediation.

Qualys says the TotalCloud technology will allow its customers to build cloud workflows that easily:

• Automate day-to-day tasks from simple asset tagging to complex scenarios involving multiple cloud services and actions, such as generating an alert when a virtual machine instance has a public IP address, excessive permissions, and exploitable vulnerabilities. 
• Integrate existing tools such as ServiceNow, Jira and Splunk into cloud workflows to automate alerting, change management, asset tagging, analytics and more. 
• Trigger actions across various Qualys apps, such as automatically starting a vulnerability scan when a new virtual machine instance is detected.

About Qualys

Qualys provides cloud-based security and compliance solutions and has over 19,000 active customers, including a majority of the Forbes Global 100 and Fortune 100. The company helps organisations streamline and consolidate their security and compliance solutions in a single platform.

Founded in 1999 as one of the first SaaS security companies, Qualys has established strategic partnerships with leading cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform. It has managed service providers and consulting organisations, including Accenture, BT, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Deutsche Telekom, DXC Technology, Fujitsu, HCL Technologies, IBM, Infosys, NTT, Optiv, SecureWorks, Tata Communications, Verizon and Wipro.

The company is also a founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance.