Acquisition to Accelerate Cisco’s Cloud Delivered Security Portfolio.
Cisco announced its intent to acquire OpenDNS [for a report $635m], a privately held security company based in San Francisco. OpenDNS provides advanced threat protection for any device, anywhere, anytime. The acquisition will boost Cisco’s Security Everywhere approach by adding broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform.
The burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything (IoE) are expected to spur the connection of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020, creating a vast new wave of opportunities for security breaches across networks. The faster customers can deploy a solution, the faster they can detect, block and remediate these emerging security threats. OpenDNS’ cloud platform offers security delivered in a Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) model, making it quick and easy for customers to deploy and integrate as part of their defense architecture or incident response strategies. By providing comprehensive threat awareness and pervasive visibility, the combination of Cisco and OpenDNS will enhance advanced threat protection across the full attack continuum—before, during and after an attack.
Typically devices and people connected to the network are easier to identify and track for potential security threats. However in a world in which devices and people can connect from anywhere at anytime, enterprise IT teams have increasingly limited visibility into potential threats from these unmonitored and potentially unsecure entry points into the network, creating tremendous security risk. Combining OpenDNS’ broad visibility, unique predictive threat intelligence and cloud platform with Cisco’s robust security and threat capabilities will increase awareness across the extended network, both on- and off-premise, reduce the time to detect and respond to threats, and mitigate risk of a security breach.