Cisco to Acquire PortShift, Target Cloud App Security, Kubernetes

Cisco has signed an agreement to acquire PortShift, a privately held company based in Israel. Portshift’s platform addresses Kubernetes security challenges.

When the deal closes, Portshift brings cloud-native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and services for Kubernetes environments to Cisco. It will help Cisco deliver security for all phases of the application development life cycle.

Cisco didn’t reveal the purchase price of the acquisition, which it expects will close by late January, the end of its fiscal second quarter.

Cisco’s Liz Centoni

“In order to help and empower our customers and partners, Cisco aims to deliver security solutions for these cloud-native development environments and to add application security constructs much earlier in the development life cycle – a paradigm being referred to as Shift Left,” Liz Centoni, senior vice president, emerging technologies and incubation, at Cisco, wrote in a blog. “We want to empower enterprise application developers by increasing agility and time to market, while significantly mitigating the risk of developing across multiple API environments.”

Vendor Alignment

PortShift aligns to Cisco’s strategy of providing:

• Secure connectivity between users, devices and apps, wherever they reside.
• Visibility and actionable insights from the end user to the application.
• A simplified consumption model that includes cloud-first secure access service edge (SASE) capabilities.
• Commitment to an open source and open standards philosophy.
• Breaking down the silos between developers, security teams, infrastructure teams, operations and SRE teams.

When the acquisition is complete, the PortShift employees will join Cisco’s emerging technologies and incubation group.

According to researchers at Omdia, Kubernetes has emerged as a de facto standard in cloud-native computing. It has done so because it is open source, vendor-neutral, and its timing was perfect in solving the need to manage containers.

In an attempt to overcome management challenges associated with the adoption of agile development methodologies, organizations are using container-management platforms. As a result, it’s spurring the market to expand. Omdia predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 30% from 2018-2023.

The adoption of cloud-native technologies using a microservices architecture is increasing the agility and flexibility of organizations. It does this by enabling the delivery of more frequent changes to meet the demands of businesses. This use of a microservices architecture for application development has prompted interest in technologies such as software containers and Kubernetes.