Acquisitions

On October 7, 2013 Cisco completed the acquisition of Sourcefire, a leader in intelligent cyber security solutions. With the close of this acquisition, Cisco will provide one of the industry's most comprehensive advanced threat protection portfolios. We will also offer a broad set of enforcement and remediation options that are integrated, pervasive, continuous, and open.

Q: Why is Cisco acquiring a security company like Sourcefire now?

A: The acquisition of Sourcefire reinforces Cisco's commitment to providing customers with one of the industry's most comprehensive advanced threat protection portfolios, as well as the broadest set of enforcement and remediation options that are integrated, pervasive, continuous and open. Cisco's broad portfolio of integrated solutions delivers unmatched visibility and continuous advanced threat protection across the entire attack continuum, allowing customers to act smarter and more quickly — before, during, and after an attack.

Q: What is the strategic importance of the Sourcefire acquisition to Cisco's Security strategy?

A: The increased scrutiny on security is being driven by the evolving trends of mobility, cloud computing, and advanced targeted attacks. More than the attacks themselves, a major consideration is the change in what defines a network, which goes beyond traditional walls and includes data centers, endpoints, virtual and mobile to make up the extended network. To truly protect against all possible attack vectors, we have to accept the nature of modern networked environments and devices and start defending them by understanding attackers and thinking like defenders responsible for securing their infrastructure. A threat-centric security model lets defenders address the full attack continuum, across all attack vectors, and respond at any time, all the time. Cisco's portfolio of integrated solutions deliver unmatched visibility and continuous advanced threat protection, allowing customers to act smarter and more quickly — before, during, and after an attack.

Q: What are the plans for Cisco integrated IPS on ASA?

A: The ASA is an industry leading firewall and Cisco intends to continue to aggressively invest and evolve the ASA. Specifically, Cisco intends to utilize the Snort engine and signature set as part of the ASA integrated IPS offers. This is in-line with the architectural evolution that was already planned as part of the Cisco platform evolution and is consistent with Cisco's commitment to growing the Snort open source community and Snort usage across the industry.

Q: What are Cisco's plans for the Sourcefire FirePOWER Platforms?

A: Sourcefire's FirePOWER platform is a powerful, integrated multi-service security appliance which aligns very well to Cisco's overall platform strategy. The FirePOWER platform performance and efficacy has been demonstrated by NSS Labs and other independent 3rd party tests. After close, Cisco intends to build upon this success and plans to further accelerate the roadmap and adoption of the FIrePOWER platform.

Q: What are Cisco's plans for Snort? The open-source standard is widely in use by Fortune 500 companies.

Snort is one of the many key assets to Sourcefire's product portfolio. Cisco is very committed to open source innovation, including Snort.

Q: What happens to the existing open source communities?

A: Cisco is committed to supporting open source communities to help protect users and organizations. There will be no changes to how the communities are managed or community communications. Mailing lists, snort.org, clamav.net and social media properties will remain the same.

Sourcefire Customers

If you are an existing customer or partner of Sourcefire and have questions about our products and services, please continue to contact your existing Sourcefire sales representative or email us at sac-support@cisco.com.

Cisco Customers

If you are an existing Cisco customer or partner and have questions about your product or services, please continue to contact your existing Cisco sales representative or partner or email us at sac-support@cisco.com.

Active Sourcefire service agreements have been migrated to Cisco service agreement contracts and integrated into our renewals management processes, as well as our support tools and processes.