It is said that the acquisition will boost Cisco's Security everywhere approach by adding broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform.
According to the press statement issued by the organization, the OpenDNS team will join the Cisco Security Business Group. As per the agreement, Cisco will pay $635 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for OpenDNS. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions.
The press statement said that the burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything (IoE) are expected to spur the connection of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020, creating a vast new wave of opportunities for security breaches across networks. The faster customers can deploy a solution, the faster they can detect, block and remediate these emerging security threats.
“OpenDNS' cloud platform offers security delivered in a Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) model, making it quick and easy for customers to deploy and integrate as part of their defense architecture or incident response strategies. By providing comprehensive threat awareness and pervasive visibility, the combination of Cisco and OpenDNS will enhance advanced threat protection across the full attack continuum before, during and after an attack,” the statement read.
The statement added that OpenDNS' broad visibility, unique predictive threat intelligence and cloud platform with Cisco's robust security and threat capabilities will increase awareness across the extended network, both on- and off-premise, reduce the time to detect and respond to threats, and mitigate risk of a security breach.
Hilton Romanski, Cisco chief technology and strategy officer, said that many people, processes, data and things connected because of which opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks.
“OpenDNS has a strong team with deep security expertise and key technology that complements Cisco's security vision. Together, we will help customers protect their extended network wherever the user is and regardless of the device,” Romanski added.
