As Cisco Systems continues to make moves towards becoming as well-known for its security expertise as its networking, the tech firm on Thursday announced it would add to its portfolio by acquiring identity threat detection and response (ITDR) startup Oort.
Once combined, Oort’s identity-centric technology will enhance Cisco’s Security Cloud’s user context telemetry, according to San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.
The two companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
The tech giant has been a strategic investor in Boston-based Oort since 2022. Oort was founded by Cisco alum Matt Caulfield, an entrepreneur, and former Cisco engineer for 10 years who has a background in cloud, networking, and data.
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“Cisco shares Oort’s commitment to securing identity as the new perimeter. With Oort’s API-driven, cloud-native, and agentless platform, they eliminate identity visibility gaps across disparate data sources, show misconfigurations, check for security vulnerabilities, and offer predictive identity analytics to proactively stop attacks. It also cuts down on remediation time by giving enterprises a clear understanding of the blast radius of an identity-related incident,” said Raj Chopra, senior vice president and chief product officer for Cisco Security, in a blog posted Thursday on the Oort purchase.
Oort’s identity-centric technology will be incorporated into the Cisco Security Cloud platform, including within Cisco’s Duo Identity Access Management (IAM) technology and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) portfolios, Chopra said.
Oort’s integrations with third-party vendors – including Google, Microsoft, Okta, and Auth0 – further supports Cisco’s commitment for interoperability, he said.
Oort was founded in 2019 and has raised $15 million in four funding rounds, the most recent being in October 2022, which earned the company $11.5 million. Cisco Investments was one of the investors.
Oort is the sixth announced acquisition for Cisco this year and its fourth security-related buy.
At the end of May, Cisco revealed plans to acquire Armorblox, a company that has pioneered the use of large language models (LLMs) and natural language understanding in cybersecurity. In March, the company unveiled plans to acquire Lightspin, a cloud security software company, as the networking giant carries out its mission to unify its security portfolio. Earlier in February, Cisco revealed plans to buy Valtix, a privately held cloud network security startup that specializes in multi-cloud network security for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle.
The Oort team — which has about 50 employees, according to LinkedIn — will join Cisco’s security business group. The two companies expect to close the acquisition during Cisco’s first quarter of fiscal year 2024, which starts in August.LEARN MORE: Cloud Security | Cybersecurity | Endpoint Security | Network Security
Gina Narcisi is a senior editor covering the networking and telecom markets for CRN.com. Prior to joining CRN, she covered the networking, unified communications and cloud space for TechTarget. She can be reached at [email protected].
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