Cisco Acquires Isovalent: A Big Win for Cloud-Native Network Security and a Validation of Tigera’s Vision

This week’s news of Cisco’s intent to acquire Isovalent sends an important message to the cloud security ecosystem: network security is no longer an afterthought in the cloud-native world. It’s now a critical component of any robust security posture for cloud-native applications. This move not only validates the work of the Isovalent team in evangelizing this essential category but also underscores the vision Tigera has pioneered since 2016 with Project Calico.

I would first like to extend heartfelt congratulations to Isovalent and its founders on their well-deserved exit and thank them for their invaluable contributions to cloud-native network security.

Cisco’s acquisition recognizes that traditional perimeter security solutions simply don’t translate to the dynamic, distributed nature of cloud-native architectures and that network security is a critical part of a good cloud-native security design. This is a fundamental truth that Tigera identified early on with Project Calico. We saw the need for a fundamentally different approach to network security, one tailored to the unique demands of containerized and distributed applications running in the cloud.

Calico Open Source, born from this vision, has become the industry leader in container networking and security. It now powers over 100 million containers across 8 million+ nodes in 166 countries, a testament to the immense value it delivers to the cloud-native community. Calico is the only platform with a pluggable data plane architecture enabling support for multiple data planes, including eBPF, standard Linux, Windows and VPP (Cisco).

Cloud security leaders have left this flank open, giving Cisco an opportunity to leverage cloud-native network security as a wedge to leapfrog the field of cloud security players.

Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent also validates eBPF’s significance and ubiquity. While Tigera and Isovalent were the pioneers in leveraging eBPF for cloud-native network security, it’s exciting to see broader use of eBPF. With usage on the rise, eBPF has become a more commoditized technology. I predict that it will be as pervasive as a programming language but invisible. While eBPF is a powerful and complex technology, the trick to unlocking the value of this technology is higher up in the stack: eBPF needs to be invisible and abstracted from the user and solutions have to be designed to be plug-and-play for users to see value. I think we’ll see the market focus shift from looking at who’s using eBPF and who’s not, to making eBPF invisible and building solutions that are simple and plug-and-play.

As an early adopter of eBPF, Tigera has fully embraced eBPF technology as part of our solution. Since 2020, Project Calico has offered a production-ready data plane based on eBPF, which is being used by some of the most advanced and sophisticated AI vendors, and an eBPF-based runtime security solution for both known and zero-day threats.

We are going to witness the broad adoption of cloud-native technologies by the Global 2000 companies over the next decade. Unlike cloud-first companies, one significant difference in the Global 2000 segment is that they will continue to have a number of workloads on-prem and will operate in a hybrid model. These companies are leveraging Kubernetes as a platform that will abstract them from the underlying infrastructure (on-prem, cloud) and will safeguard them from cloud lock-in. It will be critical to offer these customers a single solution that works across various kinds of workloads and data planes, including Windows, older versions of Linux, Cisco VPP, etc.

Looking Ahead

Cisco’s acquisition of Isovalent presents exciting opportunities for collaboration and innovation. We believe that Calico Open Source, with its commitment to open-source principles and community engagement, can play a crucial role in shaping the future of cloud-native security. Together, we can ensure that network security becomes an integral part of every cloud-native deployment, paving the way for a more secure and resilient future for all.