Cisco announced Monday that it has completed its acquisition of Splunk to deliver what it calls market-leading security and observability so organizations can get a real-time, unified view of their digital enterprises.
WHY IT MATTERS
“The combination of Cisco and Splunk will provide truly comprehensive visibility and insights across an organization’s entire digital footprint, delivering an unprecedented level of resiliency through the most comprehensive and powerful security and observability product portfolio on the market,” said Gary Steele, executive vice president and general manager of Splunk, Cisco said in the announcement.
In addition to helping teams proactively defend critical infrastructure, prevent outages and refine the network experience, Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President of Information, Operations, Cloud Operations and Dev Ops at IDC, cited the combination of technologies that the companies handling transformative.
“With the closing, Cisco has created a unique set of solutions for network, security and operations managers in the market,” said Elliot.
“When you add that to their channel and AI investments, customers should consider the higher levels of business value that can now be unlocked.”
Cisco said customers can expect:
- Better security” to prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to threats for organizations of all sizes, leveraging cloud, network, and endpoint traffic for unparalleled visibility.
- Better observability of digital experiences in a hybrid multi-cloud environment.
- Better networking “on intelligent, resilient and continuously optimized network infrastructure.”
- Better AI with enhanced security, full observability capabilities and a comprehensive data platform
- Better economics through a platform approach that consolidates numerous software applications.
Cisco further added that the rollout would follow the announcement in the coming months.
“Over time, IT and engineering teams can expect AI-based enhancements and root cause analysis assistants, including Splunk IT Service Intelligence,” said Steele and Checuk Robiins, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, in a statement blog post on the Cisco website.
Under the terms of the deal, Cisco acquired Splunk for $157 per share in cash, representing approximately $28 billion in stock value, the company said.
THE BIG TREND
As healthcare systems, hospitals and providers upgrade their IT infrastructure and adopt new tools that require massive amounts of data processing and storage, the security needs of their enterprise are increasing.
When Klamath Falls, Oregon-based Sky Lakes Medical Center upgraded to a hyper-converged infrastructure, it also added Cisco DNA Center network management, a cloud-based secure Internet gateway, firewalls and security analytics so it was able to isolate and add separate security zones to point out. for specific endpoints and applications.
Daniel Hood, chief optimist at Phronesis Security, an Australia-based B Corp cybersecurity consultancy, explained in a LinkedIn message six months ago, when the deal was first announced, the merger with Cisco Splunk solves a long-standing problem for the networking giant.
Cisco “lacked a centralized logging platform that connects all alerts from tools,” but the addition of Splunk’s technology “closes this gap,” Hood said.
Cisco has now centralized them (security information and event management).”
With centralized compliance auditing and reporting across an entire enterprise infrastructure, healthcare organizations can power AI with “infrastructure to power it, the data to develop it, a security platform to protect it, and an observability platform to monitor and manage it in real time .” Cisco said in announcing the merger closing.
ON THE RECORD
“As one of the largest software companies in the world, we will revolutionize the way our customers use data to connect and protect every aspect of their organizations as we help power and protect the AI revolution,” Robbins said in a statement declaration.
“We have had long-standing partnerships with both companies and look forward to the opportunities this partnership will bring to our clients in the future,” added Julie Sweet, Accenture chairman and CEO.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.