Cisco wants to drive connectivity through every layer of the networking stack, a move that is needed to allow enterprises to better monetize their cloud investments and one that is also becoming increasingly important as those enterprises look to drive innovation up their development stacks and deployments across the internet.

The challenge for this market is in providing enterprises with the tools needed to have full stack connectivity, full stack security, and full stack observability throughout the construct and operation of their critical applications. Most of this has already been accomplished through the lower layers of an enterprises IT infrastructure – think from the compute layer up to virtual machines (VMs) – but remains a challenge for the widening layers on top of that.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins touched on this during the vendor’s annual partner summit last year, when he laid out a six-step plan for success in a cloud-first world.

“No. 1, we want to focus on the application experience for our customers,” he said during his keynote. “We know that they’re going to begin to build more and more of their applications in a cloud native model, and they’re going to be running in a distributed capability.”

Vijoy Pandey, VP for emerging technologies and incubations at Cisco, explained in a call with SDxCentral that for Cisco, full-stack connectivity top-to-bottom means the API, the application, the cloud native layer, the virtual machine (VM) layer, bare metal, and then compute. “It's connectivity across all those layers, owned or provided by somebody else,” he added.

Pandey noted that hyperscalers have been able to tackle this full-layer API management, but those efforts are siloed into their own specific ecosystems.

However, many enterprises operate in a multicloud environment that requires a broader networking brush, which must also further reach onto “the open internet that is becoming the runtime for these apps,” Pandey said. He used the example of Apple’s ecosystem, noting that at a certain layer, users are locked into what Apple offers, but that Apple users also tap into internet-based applications like Box or Gmail that can run anywhere.

“Whether it's connectivity, security, or observability, the world does not just end at layer-7 services, it's much broader than that,” Pandey said. “And so even at that layer, it's a horizontal play that we're going after.”

Cisco has also been backing this focus with significant investments. It paid $3.7 billion for performance monitoring company AppDynamics in 2017, and just last year spent $1 billion to acquire multicloud network monitoring provider ThousandEyes.

That horizontal play is especially troubling for setting up a security perimeter, which Pandey explained is getting “very diffused.”

“It’s actually getting to the point of an API-to-API call or an API to a data object call,” Pandey said during a session at last week’s Future:NET virtual event. “As long as you can secure an API or a data object, you’re good to go.”

But, that becomes a challenge if there is no observability or connectivity into those layers. To counter that challenge, Pandey predicted that moving forward “no one is going to secure networks, but they’re only going to secure APIs and data objects.”

Cisco has been rumored to be looking at extending this capability, with startup Traceable recently cited as a potential target. The company, which came out of the gates with $20 million in Series A funding last July, is focused on that type of API-level security that Pandey mentioned.

But, Cisco is not the only one.

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, recently told SDxCentral that while “Cisco’s certainly been dancing around this area. Palo Alto, Fortinet, VMware — any company that’s trying to play even remotely up the stack from the network, which I think all the vendors are now,” could benefit from such an acquisition.