Cisco plugs away at Internet-of-Things; nabs threat intelligence firm ThreatGrid

SAN FRANCISCO---The last day of Cisco Live is closing out on the networking giant's biggest bet for long-term growth while also giving its security arm another boost.

Mala Anand, senior vice president of software and service platforms at Cisco, took the opportunity at Wednesday's keynote to clarify the difference (at least from Cisco's perspective) between the Internet-of-Things and the Internet-of-Everything.

According to Anand, the Internet-of-Everything begins with the Internet-of-Things, which she explained is the movement driving connectivity into devices that were previously not connected.

"The Internet-of-Everything is a paradigm with a promise of business transformation at scale," continued Anand, reiterating previous forecasts made by Cisco executives that the the Internet-of-Everything will evolve into a $19 trillion market soon.

Anand outlined three types of Internet-of-Everything connections: machine-to-machine, a.k.a. M2M (i.e. robots, sensors, etc.), machine-to-people, people-to-people (i.e. social networking).

This world of IoE creates a different level of complexity with hyper-distributed environments, acknowledged Anand, stressing the need to build a partner ecosystem that drive interoperability and support for a platform that can drive new sources of value and business models.

Announced more quietly amid the last day of Cisco Live this week, the San Jose-headquartered corporation is planning to acquire ThreatGrid, a New York-based malware and threat intelligence firm.

ThreatGrid comes with technology for analyzing file behavior, which is then turned around for the purpose of pinpointing attacks and defending against advanced ones in the future.

Cisco plans to incorporate ThreatGrid’s malware analysis capabilities into its own intelligent cybersecurity solutions that aggregate and correlate data across networks.

Namely, ThreatGrid's portfolio will be integrated with Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) suite, which stems from another prominent acquisition: the $2.7 billion purchase of Sourcefire in 2013.

Hilton Romanksi, senior vice president of corporate development at Cisco, explained further in a blog post on Wednesday morning how this deal and malware analysis plays into Cisco's evolving cloud and Internet-of-Everything strategies.

ThreatGRID’s on-premise products also expand our ability to help protect customers with in-house data retention requirements. AMP addresses our customers’ security needs from network to endpoint and delivers comprehensive malware-defeating capabilities, including detection and blocking, continuous analysis and retrospective remediation of advanced threats. The combination of Cisco and ThreatGRID will enhance our already strong capabilities to aggregate and correlate data to identify advanced and evasive cyber threats and provide intelligent cybersecurity solutions for the real world.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The deal is expected to close by the end of the fourth quarter of 2014.