Cisco announces plans to acquire Kubernetes security player Portshift

Cisco on Thursday announced that it plans to acquire Portshift, makers of a platform that's used to secure cloud applications on Kubernetes environments.

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Portshift is specifically focused on securing containerized applications DevOps and security teams, Cisco said. The platform uses an agentless approach to detect and mitigate Kubernetes misconfigurations, which tend to be the main driver of security issues in container environments.

Cisco intends to use Portshift's technology to expand its security services across the app development lifecycle. 

Also: What Kubernetes really is, and how orchestration redefines the data center

"Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem," said Liz Centoni, SVP of Emerging Technologies and Incubation for Cisco. 

"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."

Cisco said Portshift will join its emerging technologies group once the acquisition closes. Financial terms were not disclosed. 

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