With the aim to bolster secure networking capabilities across public clouds, American network technology giant Cisco announced its plans to acquire Isovalent, a Swiss-based company specialising in cloud-native networking and security.
The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2024, with the Isovalent team joining Cisco's Security Business Group.
This acquisition is aimed at enhancing Cisco's development of the Cisco Security Cloud, which seeks to offer advanced protection against emerging threats in multi-cloud environments, applications, and workloads, said the company.
“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, Cisco's executive vice president and general manager of Security and Collaboration.
He added, “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.”
Isovalent is mostly known for its contributions to the open-source technology eBPF and the development of Cilium, a solution for networking and security in cloud-native applications. eBPF facilitates visibility into operating systems, while Cilium offers networking capabilities and insight into cloud-native applications' behaviours and communications, thus enabling the easy definition of policies for software-defined networks.
Isovalent has recently introduced several products, including Cilium Mesh, which connects Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds; Tetragon, an eBPF-based open-source security solution for application and network behaviour; and Isovalent Enterprise, an enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon.
Cisco said that it intends to continue developing and offering Isovalent's range of products, including Isovalent Enterprise.
“Cisco is committed to nurturing, investing in, and contributing to the eBPF and Cilium open source communities,” stated Stephen Augustus, Cisco's Head of Open Source.
He added that Isovalent will accelerate innovation across the business and help strengthen the Cisco Security Cloud platform to meet the growing demands of our customers.
The company reaffirms its commitment to maintaining Cilium and Tetragon as open-source projects and plans to establish an independent advisory board to guide Cisco's contributions to these projects, aligning with the needs of the open-source community.
