Cisco Beefs Up Hyper-Converged Security Engineering Muscle With Skyport Deal

Last week, Cisco announced the purchase of Skyport Systems, a security vendor specializing in applications that operate in hybrid environments.

The acquisition is a sign that the company is not only strengthening security, but adding more support for software and cloud networks as part of a hyperconverged infrastructure approach.

Skyport is best known for SkySecure, a physical server with specialized hardware that enforces firewall rules between virtual machines hosted on it.

"This approach allows customers to have specific virtual machine firewalls and get a hardware guarantee that these rules are actually followed," said Ambuj Kumar, co-founder and CEO of Fortanix, a Mountain View-based cybersecurity company. in California. . A first use case was the protection of Active Directory, he said.

But apart from that, the platform did not have a lot of traction because it required expensive custom servers. In addition, Cisco has its own hyperconverged infrastructure product, HyperFlex.

"Cisco will not sell existing Skyport Systems offerings," a Cisco spokesperson told Data Center Knowledge. "Cisco will support the installed Skyport Systems customer base through the end dates of the contract."

More than anything, the acquisition of the intellectual capacity of Skyport.

"This acquisition will allow Cisco to utilize Skyport's intellectual property, its experienced software and network expertise," said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Business Development.

According to Salvagno, the Skyport team will join Cisco's data center computer systems product group and the service provider network.

Skyport Product Manager Nils Swart confirmed the closure of SkySecure:

Kumar, of Fortanix, said he expected to see how Skyport's know-how reaches the Cisco data center server and hyper-converged infrastructure offerings, but to a limited extent.

"The highly personalized approach used by Skyport to secure the systems will be difficult to apply to the general IT infrastructure," he said.

Here's a big lesson in safety, he added. "Security must be integrated in the infrastructure and not at the last moment".

In particular, security must focus on the applications themselves. "We have to assume that even if the infrastructure is compromised, the application remains protected," he said.

The acquisition of Skyport "gives more strength to the multimubejo bone," said Mike Sapien, senior business services analyst at Ovum.

"Cloud management is the area that Cisco is trying to catch up with," he added. "But recent moves with the multiple cloud announcement last October have great potential to overcome some of today's cloud management solutions."

Security has also been a weak point for Cisco, he said.

This is not Cisco's first acquisition to demonstrate a shift to the cloud, security and software solutions.

Last year, she acquired Cmpute.io, a cloud application optimization provider, and announced a hybrid cloud partnership with Google. He also bought Viptela, a cloud-based software-defined wide area network provider; Observable Networks, which provides for legal analysis of native cloud networks; a team of security and cloud experts from Saggezza; and AppDynamics, which specializes in monitoring application performance.

In the previous year, he purchased CliQr and CloudLock, an application-centric cloud orchestration platform and CloudLock cloud security company.


The hyperconverged infrastructure market grew by 79% in 2016, according to Gartner, and will reach general use by 2021.

"We hope that the use cases will adopt critical applications in the future," said George Weiss, a Gartner analyst, in a report. But the market still has many challenges to overcome, he added.