Cisco announced Monday that it completed the acquisition of Splunk to bring what it calls market-leading security and observability to empower organizations with 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 resilience through the most extensive and powerful security and observability product portfolio on the market," Gary Steele, executive vice president and general manager of Splunk, said in Cisco's 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 called the combination of technologies the companies hold transformative.

"With the close, Cisco has created a unique set of solutions for networking, security and operations executives in the market," Elliot said.

"When you add that to their channel and AI investments, customers should be considering the higher levels of business value that can now be unlocked."

Cisco said customers can expect the following:

• Better security "for threat prevention, detection, investigation and response for organizations of any size, utilizing cloud, network and endpoint traffic for unparalleled visibility.
• Better observability across digital experiences in a multi-cloud hybrid environment.
• Better networking "on intelligent, resilient and continually optimized network infrastructure."
• Better AI with enhanced security, full-stack observability and a comprehensive data platform
• Better economics through a platform approach that consolidates numerous software applications.

Cisco further added that rollouts would follow the announcement over the next several months. 

"In time, IT and engineering teams can expect AI-driven root cause analysis enhancements and assistants, inclusive of Splunk IT Service Intelligence," Steele and Checuk Robiins, Cisco Systems chairman and chief executive officer, said in a blog post on the Cisco website. 

Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco acquired Splunk for $157 per share in cash, representing approximately $28 billion in equity value, the company said.

THE LARGER TREND

As health systems, hospitals and providers upgrade their IT infrastructure and adopt new tools that require massive amounts of data processing and storage, their enterprise security needs multiply.

When Klamath Falls, Oregon-based Sky Lakes Medical Center upgraded to a hyperconverged infrastructure, it also added Cisco DNA Center network management, a cloud-based secure Internet gateway, firewalls and security analytics so that it was able to isolate and assign distinct security zones for specific endpoints and applications. 

Daniel Hood, chief optimist at Phronesis Security, an Australia-based B Corp cybersecurity consulting firm, explained in a LinkedIn post six months ago when the deal was first announced that the Cisco Splunk merger solves a long-time problem for the network giant.

Cisco "has lacked a centralised logging platform that ties all of the alerting from tools together," but the addition of Splunk's technology "closes this gap," Hood said. 

Cisco now has their centralized [security information and event management]."

With centralized compliance auditing and reporting across an entire business infrastructure, healthcare organizations can drive 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 the merger closing announcement. 

ON THE RECORD

"As one of the world's largest software companies, we will revolutionize the way our customers leverage data to connect and protect every aspect of their organization as we help power and protect the AI revolution," Robbins said in a statement.

"We have enjoyed long-term partnerships with both companies and look forward to the opportunities this collaboration presents to our clients in the future," Julie Sweet, chair and CEO of Accenture, added.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.