Cisco to acquire Skyport for ultra secure servers

Cisco announced its intent to acquire Skyport Systems, Inc., a start-up based in Mountain View, California that offers “hyper-secured” servers for delivering trusted computing and policy enforcement at the application edge.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

Skyport’s SkySecure converged system brings together zero trust compute, virtualization and a full stack of security technologies. It logs all traffic at a forensically auditable level, enabling users to see where traffic originates, where it is headed, whether it was allowed or not, what policy allowed or blocked it, and when and who put that policy into action. Remote management capability allows users to secure branch infrastructure without firewalls, proxies, MPLS or other security measures.

Skyport Systems team will join Cisco’s Data Center – Computing Systems Product Group, which is led by Senior Vice President and General Manager Liz Centoni and the Service Provider – Networking Group led by Senior Vice President and General Manager Jonathan Davidson.

Investors in Skyport included GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), Cisco Investments, Thomvest Ventures, Northgate Capital, InstantScale, Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Intel Capital. The company raised at least $67 million in funding over several rounds.

In June 2016, Skyport announced interoperability between its SkySecure platform and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution. The goal is to provide application-layer and system-level security and policy controls needed to extend the trust boundary from a system-level root-of-trust to the network edge. Skyport said its interoperability with Cisco ACI also mobilizes security policies, enabling them to follow workloads throughout their lifecycles, and lets users deploy and maintain secure administrative workstations, jump hosts and multi-zone DMZ architectures as an integral part of an overall security framework.