Isovalent was acquired by Cisco to advance its Security Cloud vision

With its ability to see into the inner workings of the operating system, eBPF is a perfect interface for creating security solutions

In an effort to improve its secure networking capabilities across public clouds, Cisco recently revealed that it has acquired Isovalent, a provider of open-source cloud-native networking and security. Cisco will advance its Security Cloud vision—an AI-powered, cloud-delivered, integrated security platform for businesses of all sizes—by acquiring Isovalent. With the Cisco Security Cloud, users can deliver sophisticated defense against new threats across any cloud, workload, or application by abstracting security controls from multi-cloud infrastructure. Open-source platforms are a primary focus. The development of Cilium, a cloud-native networking and security solution, has been spearheaded by the Isovalent team, which also makes significant contributions to the open-source eBPF technology.

With its ability to see into the inner workings of the operating system, eBPF is a perfect interface for creating security solutions that can safeguard a workload in operation. Cilium facilitates the smooth policy definition of software-defined networks by giving IT and platform engineering teams visibility into the behavior and communication of cloud-native applications in addition to networking capabilities. Isovalent contributes upstream software and holds leadership roles in the eBPF Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. According to Cisco, this acquisition enhances its support for the open-source environment. Cisco further declared that it would be fully committed to Cilium and Tetragon as open-source projects, and that it planned to form an impartial advisory board to help guide Cisco's contributions to these important initiatives in a direction that is in line with the requirements of the open-source community.