Is Cisco’s Acquisition of Splunk a Shade of Brilliance or Madness?
Acquiring companies in the tech space is more about defining the future and less about solving the current threats or problems. Companies acquiring technology to solve an existing problem will be less likely to see any positive return.
Many acquisitions take several months and even years to incorporate the various technical capabilities, merge sales and marketing efforts, and support the current install base.
With this in mind, what is behind the massive 28-billion-dollar acquisition of Splunk for Cisco Systems?
Both companies have done an incredible job communicating to the public the intent of this super acquisition. This acquisition makes a lot more sense than most people realize.
Splunk will continue to be the 800-pound gorilla in the SIEM marketplace. The company has done an outstanding job expanding efforts beyond just parsing logs and executing SOAR-like functionality. Deploying Splunk, so say, is like building Noah’s Arc from scratch, backward. Many times, it becomes the deployment that never ends.
Why would Cisco Systems unload $28 billion and change for this company?
Cisco, for years, has played the long game far better than most. In 2000, they understood IP telephony, wireless, and load balancing were going and bet big. The result, Cisco dominated these markets for several years. In cybersecurity, Cisco invested early in IPS, Firewall, VPN, and endpoint security; they produced exceptional results.
Now, in 2023, the Splunk thing is a whole different issue. A significant component of this is the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning to become embedded across every aspect of the enterprise, service provider, and government systems. Everything from customer success, product development, marketing, legal, finance, and human capital management has an AI element.
Hackers, thanks partly to their investment in AI-creating tools like WormGPT and FraudGPT, also plan to create more havoc on these systems.
AI will become the digital battlefield, powered by bots and AI-enabled hackers against AI-powered security operations (SecOps) teams. Gone are the rooms full of human security engineers and IT ops people processing log files and security telemetry. AI-enabled security protection layers are needed to handle the expected growth of AI-enabled email phishing attacks, DDoS attacks, and identity theft.
Splunk’s ability to cover all aspects of the environment with real-time AI and machine learning fits nicely with the Cisco-powered platforms supporting blockchain, Web 3.0, and other next-generation systems that will face attack velocities 1000 times greater than ever.
The acquisition proves that automation processing is essential to staying ahead of hackers investing in the same capability.
In the end, $28 billion is nothing compared to a system-wide outage the size of Los Angeles going down because of an automated AI-powered hack.
Planning for the future makes this deal good for all Cisco clients.
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