Given Symantec's recent acquisiton of BlueCoat (and with it BlueCoat's earlier acquired Elastica and Perspecsys cloud security gateway (CSG) assets), and IBM's organic buildout of its Cloud Security Enforcer CSG solution it comes hardly as a surprise that Cisco today announced its intent to acquire CloudLock for US$293M (in Forrester's estimation this purchase price represents at least 10-15x of CloudLock's current revenues).  Considering that CloudLock's DNA and pedigree  is mainly in cloud data governance and data leak prevention using API based connectivity to SaaS (and lately IaaS) apps without an own gateway solution, Forrester expects that Cisco will do the following with CloudLock:

1) Integrate CloudLock's CSG offering with its own Ironport Secure Web Gateway (SWG) offering for interception of on-prem to cloud traffic,

2) invest in improving machine learning and behavioral analytics (already there in CloudLock's CSG solution),

3) improve data protection and cloud encryption in the solution, 

4) use its distribution channels to penetrate the lucrative and fast-growing (Forrester's estimate: 20%-25% y/y global growth) CSG market,

5) start an acquisition of wave in which other large SWG vendors will follow suit and acquire smaller CSG vendors.