Isovalent’s team is said to significantly contribute to the open-source technology eBPF and has steered the advancement of Cilium, a cloud-native solution for networking and security, which empowers IT and platform engineering teams with strong networking features and exceptional visibility into the behaviour and communication of cloud-native applications
Isovalent to be acquired by tech major Cisco. (Credit: Kjetil Ree/Wikimedia Commons)
Cisco has revealed its intention to acquire Isovalent, a cloud-native networking and security company based on open source technologies, in a move to enhance its capabilities in secure networking across public clouds.
The financial terms of the proposed deal were not disclosed.
The acquisition of Isovalent is expected to advance the Cisco Security Cloud vision, a cloud-delivered, artificial intelligence (AI) driven integrated security platform designed for organisations of varying sizes and structures.
Cisco Security Cloud vision allows customers to abstract security controls from multicloud infrastructure, delivering advanced protection against emerging threats across any cloud, application, or workload.
Cisco executive vice president and security and collaboration general manager Jeetu Patel said: “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.”
According to Cisco, Isovalent’s team significantly contributes to the open-source technology eBPF and has steered the advancement of Cilium, a cloud-native solution for networking and security.
eBPF offers insights into the intricacies of the operating system, making it an optimal interface for constructing security systems that safeguard workloads in real-time, said Cisco.
The company further said that Cilium empowers IT and platform engineering teams with robust networking features and exceptional visibility into the behaviour and communication of cloud-native applications. This facilitates the seamless definition of policies for software-defined networks.
Isovalent has recently unveiled the Cilium Mesh solution for simplifying the integration of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds. Additionally, Isovalent introduced Tetragon, an open-source security solution based on eBPF.
Furthermore, the company launched Isovalent Enterprise, an enterprise distribution encompassing Cilium and Tetragon.
Upon the completion of the acquisition, which is anticipated in Q3 FY 2024, the Isovalent team will become part of the Cisco security business group.
In September 2023, Cisco signed a deal worth around $28bn to acquire cybersecurity and observability company Splunk.