OwnBackup Cybersecurity Offerings Beefed Up with RevCult Acquisition

New Jersey-based OwnBackup (link), flexing its latest investment, this week acquired San Diego-based independent software vendor RevCult, according to a press release. RevCult has security management products tailored for locking down enterprise permissions and managing advanced Salesforce security features. “The addition of RevCult will allow us to innovate faster in the cloud and protect customers against the primary security issues that lead to data loss and corruption, such as lax permissioning, social hacking, insider threats, poor physical security controls and other vulnerabilities,” said Sam Butmann, CEO of OwnBackup in the press release.

Salesforce Platform Cybersecurity

RevCult currently competes with AppOmni, another platform cybersecurity company. The RevCult acquisition is interesting, and is a signal from OwnBackup that they want a share of the high-value and extremely sticky Salesforce platform cybersecurity market.

A dirty little secret in Salesforce security is that the platform requires extensive checking and work to ensure that business-level security policies are properly enforced. The work explodes when there are different combinations of profiles and permission sets used in a Salesforce org. In fact, without tools like RevCult’s Cloud Security Cockpit, it is almost guaranteed that glaring data access security holes will be present in the average Salesforce org.

By adding a key cybersecurity service to their global service offerings, OwnBackup’s acquisition of RevCult should put Salesforce platform cybersecurity in the spotlight and get the service installed into more systems.

OwnBackup Keeps Buying

This is the third recent acquisition by OwnBackup, and first one done after their most recent equity investment. Earlier this year the company acquired Hyderabad, India-based Nimmetry, a data integration company. Besides extending OwnBackup to the Indian market, Nimmetry’s data platform capabilities allows OwnBackup to support better extract, translate and load (ETL) capabilities. This may provide more off-platform data management capabilities for Salesforce platform owners.

OwnBackup also announced in June, 2021 they acquired a cybersecurity consulting company named Merlinx from Tel Aviv, Israel. Prior to the acquisition, Merlinx developed cyber intelligence solutions for law enforcement, intelligence agencies and national security organizations.

Stop the Recursive FLA’s

If you’re a fan of SalesforceDevops.net, I hope you have noticed how much I hate acronyms. This is because using acronyms is alienating to people who have never heard them before. I’m sure you can relate to feeling uninformed when someone uses an unfamiliar acronym. If you are selling something, why tell someone to whom you’re selling that they are stupid if they don’t get your acronyms?

Next in today’s rant are four-letter acronyms, or FLA’s stated cynically. If you’ve got something so complex you can not explain it in a TLA (three-letter acronym), then please start over.

I have more complaints about acronyms. Among the worst things to do is to create a recursive acronym that includes the initials of other acronyms. You’ll see what I mean in a second.

I saved the very worst for last. This is when an analyst tries to invent a new acronym and then have it become a new industry standard. It is a reflexive habit that curses many of my colleagues and I think using acronyms for industry education is arrogant and intimidating.

Obviously, I’ve found OwnBackup guilty of using a stupid Gartner acronym. It is “SaaS Security Posture Management” and its inglorious recursive FLA is SSPM. Looks like someone misspelled SPAM to me.

I’m calling it Platform Cybersecurity instead. Which headline do you think a casual Salesforce platform owner is more likely to notice in demand creation marketing? SSPM or Platform Cybersecurity? I rest my case.