Cisco reached a deal to acquire Portshift, a 2-year-old startup that developed a Kubernetes-based platform to secure containers and serverless applications.

The companies did not disclose financial details. Portshift, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, raised $5.3 million in a 2018 seed round.

Portshift started as a container security platform and last month moved into serverless security. Its Kubernetes platform now provides runtime protection for Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Fargate instances running on AWS EKS.

In a blog post about the acquisition, Cisco’s Liz Centoni, SVP for emerging technologies and incubation, said Portshift’s technology will help Cisco customers enable DevSecOps and build security constructs into cloud-native applications early in the lifecycle.

Cisco’s Application Security STrategy

“The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application,” she wrote. “They bring cloud-native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments to Cisco, which will allow us to move toward the delivery of security for all phases of the application development lifecycle.”

Portshift will also boost Cisco’s secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities, Centoni said.

Cisco expects the acquisition to close in the first half of its fiscal 2021. At that time, the Portshift team will join Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group.

The deal also lines up with mergers and acquisitions priorities that Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer Anuj Kapur outlined during a Cisco Live panel over the summer. Cisco wants to work with its customers on two major initiatives: zero-trust security and application performance, Kapur said at the time.

“Fundamentally, companies are starting to recognize that their primary interface with their employees, partners, and customers over the next few years will be their applications,” Kapur said. “Applications will drive 100% of their revenue. And this notion of application resiliency, application performance, and application visibility will be central.”