Cisco Systems intends to strengthen its security portfolio by buying OpenDNS,  a company that  provides a cloud-based service to block malware.
Cisco said this morning it will pay US$635 million for the company and its Umbrella service, which will add threat intelligence to its own offerings.
“As more people, processes, data and things become connected, opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks,” Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, said in a statement. “OpenDNS has a strong team with deep security expertise and key technology that complements Cisco’s security vision. Together, we will help customers protect their extended network wherever the user is and regardless of the device.”
Combining OpenDNS’ visibility, predictive threat intelligence and cloud platform with Cisco’s security and threat capabilities will increase awareness across the extended network, both on- and off-premise, reduce the time to detect and respond to threats, and mitigate risk of a security breach, the companies said.
The release says the OpenDNS team will join Cisco’s[Nasdaq: CSCO] security business group, but it didn’t say that will include company founder and CEO David Ulevitch.  He has been working in the IT industry for years, first, before entering high school at a small regional ISP, then at MP3.com, starting as an intern and eventually working in the content development department.
While in university he created a DNS management service, EveryDNS, which still runs today. OpenDNS was started in 2006. The company just opened a London office to spread it business to Europe and the Middle East.
In May OpenDNS opened its enforcement API to customers, allowing the threat intelligence generated by their security and incident response teams into threat prevention. By monitoring new indicators of compromise generated by internal or third-party threat intelligence feeds, customers can use OpenDNS’s platform to automatically prevent attacks against both on and off-network devices, the company said.
