Cisco recently announced that it acquired privately held Isovalent, a provider of open-source cloud-native networking and security, to bolster its secure networking capabilities across public clouds.
By acquiring Isovalent, Cisco will enhance its 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 multi-cloud infrastructure to provide advanced protection against emerging threats across any cloud, application, or workload.
“Together with Isovalent, Cisco will build on the open-source power of Cilium to create a truly unique multi-cloud security and networking capability to help customers simplify and accelerate their digital transformation journeys,” said Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. "Imagine in today's distributed environment - of applications, virtual machines, containers and cloud assets - having security controls with total visibility, without hindering networking and application performance. The combination of Cisco and Isovalent will make this a reality.”
A key focus is open-source platforms.
Isovalent’s team is a major contributor to the open-source technology eBPF and has led the development of Cilium, the cloud-native solution for networking and security. eBPF provides visibility into the operating system's inner workings - 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 three key platforms:
Cilium Mesh: This platform allows for the easy connection of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds.
Tetragon: Tegragon is an eBPF-based open-source security solution that provides visibility to and enforces runtime behavior within an application and on the network.
Isovalent Enterprise: This is an enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon.
Cisco plans to continue offering and building on Isovalent’s customer innovations, including Isovalent Enterprise.
“Cisco is committed to nurturing, investing in, and contributing to the eBPF and Cilium open-source communities,” said Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco. “Isovalent’s team will join Cisco's deep bench of open-source governance and technical leadership to solve complex cloud-native, security, and networking challenges.
Isovalent holds leadership positions in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and eBPF Foundation, as well as upstream software contributions. Cisco said this acquisition strengthens its role in supporting the open-source ecosystem. Also, Cisco pledged its dedication to Cilium and Tetragon as open-source projects and intended to create an independent advisory board to help steer Cisco's contributions to these significant efforts in a way that is aligned with the needs of the open-source community.
The Isovalent team will join the Cisco Security Business Group once the acquisition closes, expected in the third quarter of the fiscal year 2024.
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