Palo Alto Networks buys Console to boost agentic security

Palo Alto Networks is bolstering its flagship security platform with the acquisition of Console and its AI-native IT service management and automation technology.

According to Palo Alto, the Console technology will expand the agentic AI capabilities of its security operations platform, Cortex, allowing security teams to investigate alerts, prioritize work, and automate actions more quickly across their networked environments.

Console’s technology works by connecting to a customer’s identity systems, SaaS applications, security tools, and other key systems. Then its AI agents can understand a request, gather the necessary context, execute a workflow, and document what happened.

“We built Console around a simple idea: people should be able to express an operational goal, and intelligent software should handle the complexity required to achieve it,” said Console CEO and co-founder Andrei Serban in a statement. “Our customers have already proven that agents can dramatically slash overhead and transform their business.”

“By bringing Console into Palo Alto Networks, our customers can have a direct conversation with data and build agentic workflows in natural language that help alert and remediate issues automatically,” Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, said in a statement. “This is the shift to software-as-an-agent, giving our platform the arms and legs to deliver autonomous security outcomes across the entire enterprise.”

The Console purchase follows other significant security buys by Palo Alto. It completed its $3.35 billion acquisition of cloud observability platform Chronosphere in January of this year, and it closed its $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk in February. Palo Alto also grabbed endpoint security startup Koi for an estimated $400 million in April, and it completed its acquisition of AI agent security firm Portkey in May.

Financial terms of the Console acquisition were not released.