Cisco has announced that it plans to buy cloud security company OpenDNS for $635 million. This amount is to be paid in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for OpenDNS, according to information released by Cisco.

OpenDNS provides a cross-platform online threat-protection service that Cisco will utilize to increase its own security, stating, “broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform.”

Hilton Romanski, leader of business development at Cisco, said, “The acquisition will extend our ability to provide customers enhanced visibility and threat protection for unmonitored and potentially unsecure entry points into the network, and to quickly and efficiently deploy and integrate these capabilities as part of their defense architecture.”

OpenDNS will join the Cisco Security Business Group and the deal is expected to close during the first quarter of fiscal 2016.  David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS, said,  “We’re not going anywhere and OpenDNS as you know it will continue to work as it does today.” While OpenDNS has over 50 million users, it has only 10,000 paying customers and runs 24 data centers.

Cisco has stated, “The burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything 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.”

Hilton Romanski also added “As more people, processes, data and things become connected, opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks.”

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