By: Craig Kennedy
Cisco to Acquire Isovalent—One Big Step in its Drive to Multi-Cloud Security
On December 21st, 2023, Cisco announced its intent to acquire Isovalent, a major player in the cloud native networking, observability, and security space.
Financial details have not been disclosed, however Isovalent has raised a total of $69 million over two funding rounds with Cisco participating as an investor during its Series A funding.
Isovalent—Revolutionizing Cloud-Native Workloads
Isovalent, led by co-founders Dan Wendlandt (CEO) and Thomas Graf (CTO), has made significant contributions to cloud-native networking and security.
Its technology builds upon the open-source project Cilium, a Container Network Interface (CNI) that integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes for provisioning, securing, and observing network connectivity between services using extended Berkley Packet Filter (eBPF) technology. This provides for high granular control and visibility of network traffic managed at the kernel level offering very high network efficiency.
Beyond Linux Containers—To Multi-Cloud and Beyond
Initially developed for Linux containers, Cilium has proven to be such a game changer in network security and observability that it has been ported to Windows and embraced by the three major cloud providers (Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS) as their network deployment, security, and observability platform for their respective Kubernetes offerings.
In April 2023, Isovalent announced Cilium Mesh, expanding Cilium functionality beyond Kubernetes workloads to virtual machines and physical servers regardless of where they’re running (in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge) and providing all the network security, manageability, and observability provided by Cilium.
Commitment to Open Source
Isovalent has been a major supporter and contributor to both the eBPF foundation and the Cilium project. The company’s vision and commitment to open-source technology have been instrumental in its success and Cisco has committed to continuing this commitment moving forward.
Bottom Line
This acquisition further supports and strengthens the Cisco Security Cloud vision of providing advanced protection against emerging threats across any cloud, application, or workload. Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent is a strategic move that enables it to offer enhanced networking, security, and observability capabilities at the kernel level to complement its abilities within its existing product portfolio.
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