Cisco recently announced the intent to buy Isovalent, a leader in open-source cloud-native networking and security, to boost its secure networking capabilities across public clouds. The acquisition of Isovalent will build on Cisco’s Security Cloud vision, an AI-driven and integrated security platform for organizations of all sizes.
And 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.
Isovalent’s team is a major contributor to the open-source technology eBPF and led the development of Cilium, the leading cloud-native solution for networking and security. And eBPF provides unmatched visibility into the operating system’s inner workings – an ideal interface for building security systems that can protect a workload while it runs. Cilium offers IT and platform engineering teams powerful networking capabilities and unparalleled visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud-native applications, enabling seamless policy definition of software-defined networks. Plus, Isovalent has also recently introduced:
1.) Cilium Mesh – Enables the easy connection of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds,
2.) Tetragon – An eBPF-based open-source security solution that provides visibility to and enforces runtime behavior within an application and on the network.
3.) Isovalent Enterprise – An enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon
Cisco plans 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, along with upstream software contributions. And this acquisition strengthens Cisco’s role in supporting the open-source ecosystem.
As leaders in networking and security, Cisco and Isovalent will build solutions powered by eBPF technology that aims to solve the challenge of protecting workloads no matter where they reside. And Cisco is committed to Cilium and Tetragon as open-source projects and intends to create an independent advisory board to help steer Cisco’s contributions to these important efforts in a way that is aligned with the needs of the open-source community.
Isovalent’s team will join the Cisco Security Business Group once the acquisition closes, which is expected in the third quarter of fiscal year 2024.
KEY QUOTES:
“Together with Isovalent, Cisco will build on the open source power of Cilium to create a truly unique multicloud security and networking capability to help customers simplify and accelerate their digital transformation journeys. 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.”
- Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco
“Cisco is committed to nurturing, investing in, and contributing to the eBPF and Cilium open source communities. 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. Their knowledge will accelerate innovation across the business and help further strengthen the Cisco Security Cloud platform to meet the growing demands of our customers.”
- Stephen Augustus, Head of Open Source at Cisco
