Cisco has revealed plans to acquire Israeli cyber security startup Portshift, in a move the tech firm says will enable its security platform to better deploy and manage Kubernetes container clusters. 

Announcing the acquisition, Cisco said that Portshift aligns to its own approach to providing secure connectivity between users, devices and apps, regardless of where they are based. 

A Kubernetes-native security platform, Portshift enables DevOps, security and operations teams to maintain security of the entire containerised applications life-cycle, from their creation to implementation. 

Portshift’s products are also designed to provide vulnerability and configuration management, network segmentation, data encryption, as well as compliance auditing.

“Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem,” commented Cisco SVP Liz Centoni said in a blog post. “The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application.

“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 was founded in 2018 by CEO Ran Ilany, the former head of security infrastructure at Check Point Technologies, and vice president of research and development Zohar Kaufman, who also previously co-founded CTERA networks. 

The Tel-Aviv firm has raised around $5.3 million in seed funding from the Team8 cybersecurity foundry and currently has a workforce of 14 employees. 

Cisco said it expects to complete the transaction during the first half of its FY21 but did not reveal any financial details surrounding the move. According to a report from Globes, however, the figure is expected to total around $100 million.