Twilio Acquires Ionic Security to Provide the Most Trusted Customer Engagement Platform

May 17, 2021
Written by
Alex Lowe
Twilion

Ionic Security Hero

We're extremely happy to announce that Ionic Security and Twilio are joining forces.

Twilio’s vision is to build the world’s leading customer engagement platform, trusted by developers and businesses globally. At Twilio, trust is the number one thing we sell, and being a leader in security, data protection, and compliance is critical to achieving our vision. The acquisition of Ionic Security, a leading data security platform designed to help businesses enforce access and privacy requirements, will create opportunities to develop a more robust suite of data trust services for the company.

We are so excited to have the Ions become Twilions and be a part of this mission!

Ionic: Establishing trust, one transaction at a time 

Founded in 2011, Ionic has been on a mission to simplify data security at scale through granular policy and cryptographic key management, consistently applied. Like Twilio, Ionic has a passion for serving developers and Ionic’s platform has empowered developers to build applications with privacy- and security-by-design through a powerful set of cloud-based APIs, SDKs, and tools.

Ionic’s platform protects sensitive data in some of the most demanding security environments in large enterprises, financial institutions, and government applications. All trust must be earned in Zero Trust architectures like these; it can't be assumed or inferred. Ionic's authorization checks the full context of every request against policy to establish trust before access is granted. At Twilio, we have been very impressed at the scale, resiliency, and proof of compliance that Ionic has developed.

The Ionic platform is designed to decouple access logic from application code; this enables operators to orchestrate and change policy enforcement across multiple systems with minimal to no code changes. When policy requirements change, this design makes companies agile at implementing alterations wherever sensitive data resides or is accessed.

How Ionic will support Twilio in addressing evolving security and compliance challenges

While Ionic will no longer be accepting new customers as a standalone platform, Ionic has the potential to offer a differentiating capability when packaged as part of Twilio’s communications services. Twilio intends to integrate Ionic’s technology as a flexible, critical security infrastructure capability that all of our customers can leverage.

By acquiring Ionic, we will accelerate the development of Twilio’s data security features and capabilities, particularly in meeting new and enhanced global data compliance guidelines. With new government regulations related to data protection – and variances based on industry and geographic location – this level of adaptability and control will be required by many of our enterprise customers, especially those in regulated markets.  

Joining forces to serve customers better

Ionic and Twilio share a developer-centric focus, and as Ions become Twilions, we're delighted to continue building out data security and privacy capabilities for our customers all around the world and across industries.

Now that Twilio and Ionic have joined forces, we're more excited than ever to see what you build.

Alex Lowe is Head of Global Product Development at Twilio, focusing on extending Twilio’s communications and engagement products into geographic markets across the globe. He’s thrilled about how Ionic + Twilio will empower developers to build applications to reach users all across the globe while prioritizing data security, privacy, and compliance.