Just before the Christmas and New Year's holidays, Cisco today announced its intent to acquire Isovalent, a company focused on open-source, cloud-native networking and security. This is Cisco's sixth cybersecurity deal and its third cloud security-related acquisition so far this year.

Founded by the creators of extended Berkeley Packet Filter [eBPF] and the team behind Cilium and Tetragon, Isovalent builds open-source networking, service mesh, security and observability software for cloud-native infrastructure. The startup has banked $69 million over two funding rounds so far.

Cisco participated in Isovalent’s $29 million Series A funding round in 2020 as an investor when Andreessen Horowitz and Google were the lead investors. Back then, the company’s Cilium was already used for cloud-native connectivity and was the default in managed Kubernetes offerings of several major public cloud providers, including Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Anthos and Amazon EKS Anywhere, according to Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of Cisco’s security business group.

The tech giant plans to build Isovalent onto its Cisco Security Cloud solution, which is a unified platform that integrates security and networking services across hybrid multicloud environments for the entire IT ecosystem.

"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,” Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM of security and collaboration at Cisco, said in a statement.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2024, and the companies did not disclose financial terms. The Isovalent team will join the Cisco Security Business Group once the acquisition closes.

The Isovalent team is a major contributor to the open-source eBPF technology, which is a technology with origins in the Linux kernel that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context, such as the operating system kernel.

“It is an open-source technology that allows sophisticated software programs to program the heart of the operating system — known as the kernel — without actually changing the heart of the operating system,” Gillis wrote in a blog post. “This is incredibly powerful because it unlocks security, observability and networking functionality at the kernel level that was not possible before.”

The team also led the Cilium development, which offers networking capabilities and visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud-native applications. It is a graduated Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, having recently joined the ranks of Kubernetes, Prometheus and Envoy. It's used by Adobe, Alibaba, AWS, Google, SAP and more.

“Cilium gained high adoption with hyperscalers and cloud providers because of its unparalleled visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud-native applications and seamless ability to define the policy of a software-defined network [SDN],” Gillis wrote.

Isovalent also recently introduced Cilium Mesh for the easy connection of Kubernetes clusters with existing infrastructure across hybrid clouds, eBPF-based open-source security solution Tetragon and Isovalent Enterprise, which is an enterprise distribution of Cilium and Tetragon.

"With a disruptive impact on networking, security and observability, Isovalent’s technologies have revolutionized large-scale cloud-native deployments, scaling seamlessly from hundreds to millions of containers in real-world scenarios,” Umesh Padval, venture partner at Thomvest Ventures, told SDxCentral in an email. “Isovalent was recognized last week among Fortune Cyber 60 as one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity startups."

Padval is also a member of Isovalent's board; Thomvest Ventures led Isovalent’s $40 million Serious B round in September last year.

Chris McHenry, VP of product management at Aviatrix, echoed that the acquisition is “further validation” that the market for the convergence of networking, observability and security for all cloud workloads in the cloud is becoming mainstream.

Post-acquisition, Cisco plans to continue offering and enhancing Isovalent’s services. It also plans to work with CNCF and other open-source communities to help build protections for any cloud workload based on the open-source technology and the threat intelligence of Cisco Talos and Cisco’s security analytics capabilities.

“Cisco is committed to Cilium and Tetragon as open-source projects and intends to create an independent advisory board to help steer Cisco’s contributions to these important efforts in a way that is aligned with the needs of the open-source community,” Gillis wrote.

“Cisco will continue offering and enhancing Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium to customers. Isovalent’s Cilium Mesh complements Cisco's software-defined networking solutions and together would give customers seamless and secure networking from the branch office to the data center to the public cloud, using one continuous mesh,” he added.