Cisco has acquired Isovalent. The company is thus expanding its offerings in the direction of open-source networking and security. It hopes to protect public cloud environments even better than it has before.
With this acquisition, of which no financial details were disclosed, Cisco ultimately wants to offer the right edge protection for every workload and in every cloud environment. This also means that open-source solutions and applications can be used for this purpose.
According to Cisco, the acquisition fits into the AI-powered Cisco Security Cloud vision. This vision should allow companies to abstract the security controls of multicloud environments. As a result, it could provide advanced protection against emerging threats to cloud environments, applications and workloads.
Technology from Isovalent
Isovalent is the right player for this with an open-source foundation, Cisco believes. The Switzerland-based company is an expert in open-source eBPF technology. eBPF allows programs to run in a privileged context. Isovalent developed cloud-based solution Cilium for networking and security on this basis.
Within the combination of both technologies, eBPF provides great insight into how operating systems work and is an excellent interface for creating security systems that protect workloads as they run.
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In addition, Cilium offers great networking capabilities and has very comprehensive insight into the behavior and communication of cloud-based applications. This then makes it possible to effortlessly define policies of software-defined networks.
Isovalent also offers a trio of solutions that use these technologies. Examples include Cilium Mesh for connecting Kubernetes clusters to existing infrastructure in hybrid cloud environments and the eBPF-based tool Tetragon for visability and controlling runtime behavior in applications and within networks.
There’s also Isovalent Enterprise, the enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon.
Cisco continues to contribute to open source
Cisco plans to continue contributing to all open source developments and communities around eBPF and Cilium after the acquisition. In addition, Isovalent’s strong position in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the eBPF Foundation should ensure that Cisco’s position in this (open-source) cloud sector is also further strengthened. It should also help Cisco in supporting the open source ecosystem.
For the developments around Cilium and Tetragon, Cisco also wants to set up an independent advisory board to align Cisco’s contributions for this as carefully as possible.
The deal should eventually come to fruition in the third quarter of fiscal 2024. That’s when Isovalent will merge into the Cisco Security Business Group.
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