Buying Sentryo will give Cisco support in both anomaly and real-time threat detection for the Industrial Internet of Things.

To expand its iot security management offerings, Cisco plans to acquire Sentryo, a France-based company that provides anomaly detection and real-time threat detection for the Industrial Internet of Things.

Founded in 2014, Sentryo’s products include ICS CyberVision (a platform for asset inventory, network monitoring and threat intelligence) and CyberVision network boundary sensors, which are used to analyze network traffic.

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“We combine Sentryo’s edge sensors with our industrial networking hardware through Cisco’s IOx application framework,” Rob Salvagno, Cisco’s vice president of enterprise development and Cisco Investments, wrote in a blog post about the planned acquisition.

“We believe connectivity is fundamental to iot projects, and by unleashing the power of the web, we can greatly improve the efficiency of our operations and discover new business opportunities. “With the addition of Sentryo, Cisco can provide systems control engineers with deeper asset visibility to optimize systems, detect anomalies, and protect their networks.”

Gartner wrote of Sentryo’s system: “ICS CyberVision products provide visibility into their customers’ OT networks in a way that all their OT users can understand, not just IT technicians. With hackers and regulators increasingly focused on industrial control systems, it is critical that an organization’s OT have complete visibility. Many OT networks are not only geographically dispersed, but also complex, consisting of thousands of components.”

Sentryo’s ICS CyberVision enables companies to ensure the continuity, dynamic resilience and security of their industrial operations against possible cyber attacks, said Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Nandini Natarajan. “It will use a unique ‘common OT language’ in the form of tags to automatically describe assets and communication flows, describing what each asset is doing in plain text. ICS CyberVision allows anyone to instantly view a device’s categories and behaviors; It uses artificial intelligence algorithms to provide many different analytical views to give users insight into how much data can be generated by a typical industrial control system. Sentryo makes it easy to view important or relevant information.”

In addition, Sentryo’s platform uses deep Packet detection (DPI) to extract information from packets of communication between industrial devices, Natarajan said. The DPI engine is deployed with an edge computing architecture and can run on Sentryo sensor devices as well as on already installed network devices. As a result, Sentryo can embed visibility and network security features into industrial networks rather than deploying out-of-band monitoring networks.

Sentryo’s technology will expand Cisco’s overall plans for the Internet of Things. In January, Cisco unveiled a suite of switches, software, development tools, and blueprints that will be used to integrate the Internet of Things, industrial networking based on intent, traditional information security, traditional information monitoring, and application development support.

The new platform, which can be managed through Cisco’s DNA center, allows customers to integrate their Internet of Things, industrial network control and their business IT world.

DNA Center is Cisco’s centralized management tool for enterprise networking with automation, secure setup, structure configuration, and policy-based partitioning. It is also at the heart of the company’s IBN initiative to proactively provide customers with the ability to dynamically automate network and policy changes and ensure data delivery in the process. IoT Field Network Director is the software that manages Cisco Industrial, multi-service networks that connect grid routers and terminals.

Liz Centoni, senior vice President and General manager of Cisco’s iot business group, said the company hopes Sentryo’s technology will help iot customers in a number of ways:

Supports the passive DPI function of the network, which is used to discover IOT and OT devices and establish communication patterns between devices and systems. Sentryo’s sensors can be deployed locally within Cisco’s IOx framework and can be built into the industrial networks on which these devices run, rather than adding additional hardware.

With the establishment of device identification and communication patterns, Cisco will integrate the DNA center and identity Services Engine (ISE) so that customers can easily define segmentation strategies. This integration will enable OT teams to leverage the expertise of IT security teams to protect their environment without putting operational processes at risk.

Because these iot devices lack modern embedded software and security features, network segmentation will be a key technology to allow operational devices to communicate with legitimate systems and reduce the risk of cyber security incidents like the one we’ve seen with WannaCry and Norsk Hydro.

Sentryo has an estimated annual revenue of $3.5 million, according to Crunchbase, and competes the most with Cymmetria, Team8, and Indegy. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of Cisco’s first quarter of fiscal 2020, October 26, 2019. Cisco did not disclose financial details of the acquisition.

Sentryo is Cisco’s second acquisition this year. Cisco acquired Singularity’s network analytics technology in January. In 2018, Cisco acquired six companies, including Duo Security Software.

Via: www.networkworld.com/article/340…

Written by Michael Cooney, lujun9972 (translated by Hopefully2333

This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China