Cisco set to acquire security start-up Portshift

Networking giant says its latest buy is a reflection of its renewed focus on cloud-native apps

Cisco has announced its intent to buy security start-up Portshift, in a move the US networking giant says is indicative of "a further focus" on application security.

Founded in 2018, Portshift is an Israeli firm founded by the former boss of Check Point Software Technologies' security infrastructure unit, Ran Ilany.

Local newspaper, the Globes, reports that the deal is worth $100m

Portshift has a Kubernetes-native security solution, which it claims offers customers a single pane of glass for containers and Kubernetes security.

In a blog post, Cisco's SVP of strategy and emerging technologies, Liz Centoni, said the vendor sees application workload security as a growing priority.

"As the proliferation of cloud-native apps continues to accelerate with the aim to transact business efficiently and securely from anywhere, the security landscape is converging toward protecting both people and applications," she said.

She added that Cisco has made a stronger cloud-native apps security play now because business agility requirements are "pushing security up the stack and earlier in the application development lifecycle​."

"The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application. They bring cloud native application security capabilities and expertise for containers and service meshes for Kubernetes environments to Cisco, which will allow us to move toward the delivery of security for all phases of the application development​ lifecycle."

Centoni said the deal is expected to close in the first half of Cisco's FY2021.