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Cisco<\/a> has made another acquisition in the enterprise security space \u2014 underscoring the ongoing market demand for security services amid a growing threat of cyber breaches and malicious hacking among businesses that are moving to cloud-based infrastructures.<\/p>\n Today, the IT giant\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0it has acquired Observable Networks<\/a>, a company based out of St. Louis that provides real-time network behavior monitoring to help IT teams detect anomalies that might be related to security breaches, focusing particularly on cloud deployments.<\/p>\n Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. Observable has been around since 2011, founded by Patrick Crowley (who is its CTO), and it has raised less than $5 million from investors<\/a>, according to Crunchbase. The company was estimated<\/a> to be valued at around $16 million in its last round of funding in May 2016 (which to me seems a bit low).<\/p>\n Observable\u2019s CEO Bryan Doerr\u00a0notes in his own blog post<\/a> that all the startup\u2019s employees will be joining Cisco as part of the deal.<\/p>\n Cisco said Observable\u2019s cloud-native forensics applications \u2014 priced in tiers<\/a> using a SaaS model based on the size of your business and the number of endpoints secured \u2014 will become a part of its\u00a0Stealthwatch<\/a>\u00a0solution, which is part of the company\u2019s Security Business Group led by David Ulevitch. Ulevitch joined Cisco when the company acquired his own security startup, OpenDNS, in 2015 for $635 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n Indeed, Cisco has made a number of security acquisitions over the years to build up that aspect of its business: two recent deals in addition to OpenDNS include Lancope for $453 million<\/a> and CloudLock for $293 million. In June of this year, it also unveiled a new initiative<\/a> around cloud-based security services, which included a service to detect malware in encrypted traffic.<\/p>\n Cybercrime is projected to reap some\u00a0$6 trillion in damages<\/a>\u00a0by 2021, and businesses are likely to invest around\u00a0$1 trillion<\/a>\u00a0over the next five years to try to mitigate that.<\/p>\n This deal is significant not only because it underscores the ongoing interest in security solutions, and subsequent consolidation in that area, it also highlights the fact that Cisco \u2014 a company that makes switching and routers for servers \u2014 is continuing to build up its business in applications and cloud services as more companies move their businesses into cloud-based or hybrid architectures.<\/p>\n