Cisco acquires Lancope Inc. to boost cyber security solutions
As enterprises digitise their businesses and 50 billion devices look set to come online over the next five years, cyber attackers are perpetually trying to stay one step ahead of these trends and become more adept at exploiting security weaknesses and avoiding detection.
To help their customers address these nascent risks, Cisco has become focussed on delivering solutions across the extended network; what they call Security Everywhere.
They are embedding threat protection capabilities from the enterprise infrastructure to the data centre, from mobile to the cloud, and through to endpoints.
To address this proliferation of security threats and help customers to protect their networks and endpoints, Cisco have announced their intent to acquire privately-held Lancope Inc.
Lancope, thought its StealthWatch system, provides network behaviour analytics, threat visibility and security intelligence to protect enterprise networks against today’s top threats. Lancope has already formed part of Cisco’s security solution for many years through a successful commercial relationship, and now they will become one entity.
The combined solutions will help secure customers’ resources and critical assets by using their networks as a sensor – extending protection further into their networks and allowing them to seem more threats and to identify these threats faster. Together, Cisco and Lancope look set to advance Cisco’s Security Everywhere strategy of providing advanced threat protection across the full attack continuum – before, during, and after an attack.
Rob Salvagno, Vice President, Cisco Corporate Development, said: “As enterprises digitise, security challenges rapidly evolve. Real time visibility and understanding of the behaviour of every machine or device on the network becomes critical in adapting the ability of enterprises to identify and respond to the next wave of cyber threats.
“Cisco is committed to helping organisations defend their networks and devices. Together with Lancope, our combined solutions can help turn a customer’s entire network into a security sensor.”
The Lancope team will become part of the Cisco Security Business Group organisation which is led by David Goeckeler, Senior Vice President and General Manager. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $452.5 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention based incentives for Lancope employees who join Cisco.
The acquisition of Lancope complements Cisco’s other recent security acquisitions, which include OpenDNS, Portcullis and Neohapsis. This latest acquisition should close in the second quarter of Cisco’s current fiscal year.
Read the official Cisco Press Release here.
(Adapted from original published to Cisco Blogs on 27th October 2015 by Rob Salvagno – please see: https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-security-news-2)