Cisco gains container security with Banzai Cloud buy

In its second cloud-native technology acquisition in as many months, Cisco is buying container security firm Banzai Cloud for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2017, Banzai is known for developing Kubernetes-based cloud application development and security technologies. It will become part of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, where the company brews new projects for cloud-native networking, security and edge computing environments.

“As modern cloud-native applications become more pervasive, the environments in which these applications run are becoming thinner (containers, microservices, functions), increasingly distributed and more geographically diverse. Emerging cloud infrastructure technologies give rise to unique implementation challenges as the modern cloud-native application relies on the network to provide application and API connectivity and a runtime platform for an ever-changing cloud topology,” wrote Liz Centoni, a senior vice president at Cisco, in a blog about the acquisition. “Addressing these challenges will drive developer agility and reduce friction so they can focus on writing code while spending less time managing the environments in which their applications run.”

Growing its cloud security portfolio was the objective last month when Cisco grabbed Portshift, founded in 2018, for a reported $100M.

“Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem. The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application,” Centoni wrote last month. “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.”

Portshift, too, will become part of Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group.

Cisco has now made six acquisitions this year, including Fluidmesh for wireless backhaul, Modcam for video analytics, and ThousandEyes for Internet intelligence.