Epsagon start-up strengthens Cisco’s security stack

With the acquisition of Epsagon’s cloud-based application performance technology for $500 million, Cisco intends to strengthen its enterprise application management suite. Founded in 2017, Israeli company Epsagon has developed cloud application monitoring software capable of performing detailed examination of cloud microservices and applications. “Enterprises are adopting cloud-native technologies, microservices, and containerized components at scale and continue to leverage a vast web of traditional components, third-party services, and application programming interfaces (APIs),” Liz wrote. Centoni, Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Applications Officer, in a blog post about the acquisition. “This significantly increases the complexity of IT environments,” added Ms. Centoni. “Monitoring the performance, optimization and security of every digital experience involves multiple teams, who must examine every component, from application services, networks, infrastructure, to cloud and databases, and they must understand the information collected and its impact on customers’ digital experiences. Traditional domain-centric monitoring tools address only some of these needs and for one domain at a time,” the executive explained.

That’s where Epsagon’s integrated technology and Cisco’s comprehensive application management suite, which includes AppDynamics, ThousandEyes and Intersight, come into play because, according to Cisco, they will allow IT teams to monitor and troubleshoot application and microservices environments. The Cisco management suite that Epsagon will strengthen includes the AppDynamics performance management platform, which relies on a series of agents and controllers to monitor the performance of application code, execution and behavior. Agents are deployed across the enterprise on devices, containers, and host application locations. AppDynamics uses AI and machine learning to correlate information from different domains to better understand application performance and infrastructure dependencies and quickly identify issues. The system supports analytics to help IT teams understand why things aren’t working optimally, analyze root causes, and predict when issues may arise.

Complete visibility across the entire stack

ThousandEyes software analyzes the performance of local and WAN networks and those of the Internet. Using its global system of software and agents, ThousandEyes provides cloud, enterprise, and edge service insights that enable network, application, and cloud teams to work together to quickly isolate and resolve issues. problems. Cisco recently added a ThousandEyes agent to its Catalyst 9300 and 9400 Series switches that monitors the performance of applications and network components on campus and branch networks. The final piece of the management suite is Intersight, Cisco’s cloud-based systems management offering for managing Kubernetes containers. “With Intersight Kubernetes Service, infrastructure teams can automate the lifecycle management of Kubernetes and containerized applications in any environment,” Cisco explained. “The service provides observability across the entire application stack, network infrastructure and security by offering real-time insights correlated across domains and integrated with business context powered by AI and machine learning. “, further explained Liz Centoni. “It gives all teams involved full visibility across the entire stack so they can take quick action. This allows them to link performance to core business metrics and prioritize actions based on business impact,” she added.

Epsagon is the fifth acquisition made by Cisco this year, following notably the acquisition of Fluidmesh for its expertise in industrial IoT, Kenna Security for its vulnerability management technology and Sedona Systems for its software-defined networking technology. Upon completion of the Epsagon acquisition, the company will become part of Cisco’s Strategy, Incubation and Applications group.