DigiCert today announced it is acquiring Vercara, a provider of Domain Name System (DNS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) security services delivered via the cloud.

Expected to close later this year, the acquisition will enable DigiCert to combine a DNS-based service with its existing portfolio of certificate management services.

DigiCert CEO Amit Sinha said the combined company will streamline the number of vendors an organization might otherwise need to engage, to gain access to these highly complementary services.

Vercara today provides an enterprise-grade managed authoritative DNS service, dubbed UltraDNS, that securely delivers fast and accurate query responses to websites and other vital online assets, along with UltraDDoS Protect, UltraWAF, UltraAPI and UltraEdge services providing additional layers of security.

The domain control validation and simplified DNS configuration capabilities provided by Vercara align with the core public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificate management services that DigiCert uses to protect and authenticate people, websites, content, software and devices from, for example, domains that have been recently created that make use of typosquatting to distribute malware.

There also has of late been a rise in DDoS attacks that target DNS servers, which can be effectively combatted by rerouting DNS traffic to another instance of that DNS server using the UltraDDoS Protect service.

In addition, the combined company will extend those capabilities to enable organizations to track the provenance of content in an artificial intelligence (AI) era that is witnessing the creation of “deep fakes” to create images and audio files of events that never actually happened, said Sinha. One of the best ways to combat those threats is to be able to conclusively show where an original piece of content that is now being used to help create a deep fake was created, he added.

There will even come a day when consumers of content will be able to look for some type of certification that verifies a piece of content was created by a trusted source, noted Sinha.

The acquisition of Vercara comes at a time when many organizations are looking to consolidate the number of security tools, platforms and services needed to both reduce cost and streamline workflows. Each time an organization adds another tool from a different vendor the workflow that needs to be managed becomes that much more complex. Many organizations today are reluctant to add additional tools and platforms, simply because there isn’t enough cybersecurity expertise available to learn how to use and maintain them.

Many organizations are also now combining security and network operating teams to address that skills shortage using DevOps workflows to automate, for example, the provisioning of certificates, noted Singh. That approach should enable cybersecurity teams to spend more time finding and remediating vulnerabilities versus managing infrastructure.

Regardless of approach, the number of websites and applications organizations need to secure is only going to continue to increase in the age of digital business transformation. The challenge is finding a way to leverage cloud-based services to secure them at the level of scale that is now required.