Cisco to Acquire Isovalent

Cisco announces intent to acquire Isovalent, Inc.

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is to acquire Isovalent, a Cupertino, CA-based leader in open source cloud native networking and security, to bolster its secure networking capabilities across public clouds.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

The acquisition of Isovalent will build on the Cisco Security Cloud vision, an AI-driven, cloud delivered, integrated security platform for organizations of any shape and size. The Cisco Security Cloud enables customers to abstract security controls from multicloud infrastructure to provide advanced protection against emerging threats across any cloud, application or workload.

Isovalent’s team is a major contributor to the open source technology eBPF, and has led the development of Cilium, a cloud native solution for networking and security. eBPF provides visibility into the inner workings of the operating system – an ideal interface for building security systems that can protect a workload while it runs. Cilium provides IT and platform engineering teams with networking capabilities and visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud native applications, enabling seamless policy definition of software-defined networks. Isovalent has also recently introduced:

  • Cilium Mesh:  allows for the easy connection of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds,
  • Tetragon: an eBPF-based open source security solution that provides visibility to and enforces runtime behavior within an application and on the network.  
  • Isovalent Enterprise: an enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon

Cisco intends to continue offering and building on Isovalent’s slate of innovations for customers, including Isovalent Enterprise.

Isovalent holds leadership positions in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and eBPF Foundation, in addition to upstream software contributions, and this acquisition strengthens Cisco’s role in supporting the open source ecosystem.

The Isovalent team will join the Cisco Security Business Group once the acquisition closes, which is expected in the third quarter of fiscal year 2024. 

FinSMEs

21/12/2023