Cisco Systems Inc. said today it’s expanding its reach into container management and DevOps security through the acquisition of Israeli startup Portshift Ltd. for an undisclosed amount.

Portshift has built a Kubernetes-native security platform that’s focused on securing container applications for DevOps teams, Cisco said. Kubernetes is open-source software that’s used to manage large numbers of software containers, which host the components of modern apps that can run on any platform.

Portshift’s platform uses an agentless approach to detect and mitigate misconfigurations in Kubernetes, which are one of the main causes of security problems in container environments, Cisco said. The company had raised $5.3 million in seed funding from the venture capital firm Team8, which is backed by Cisco, Microsoft Corp. and Walmart Inc.

In a blog post, Liz Centoni, Cisco’s senior vice president of emerging technologies and incubation, said the company will use Portshift’s technology to expand security services across application development lifecycles.

The acquisition is timely because enterprises are still struggling to secure their Kubernetes deployments. A recent report from Kubernetes security firm StackRox Inc. found 44% of enterprises have had to delay moving Kubernetes applications into production due to security concerns. And it said misconfigurations are responsible for 67% of those security issues.

With Portshift’s technology, Cisco aims to address many of those problems. “Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem,” Centoni said. “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.”

The acquisition is another example of how companies that offer services around Kubernetes are increasingly paying attention to security concerns. Last May, VMware Inc. acquired a startup called Octarine Inc. that sold software for protecting Kubernetes clusters from hacking. The same month, machine identity protection firm Venafi Inc. bought Jetstack Inc., which made security certificate management tools for Kubernetes.

Cisco said Portshift’s technology and team will be absorbed into its emerging technologies unit once the deal closes in the first half of its fiscal 2021 year.

Image: Portshift