As the world’s top network equipment supplier, Cisco Systems Inc. will support much of the traffic from the estimated 50 billion connected devices that are expected to come online by the end of the decade. That responsibility encompasses not only meeting bandwidth and uptime requirements but also security, which is what its latest acquisition is meant to address.

The Georgia-based Lancope Inc. has developed a service that taps the switches, routers and firewalls that make up a corporate network for insight into the traffic flowing within. Important activity like access requests to mission-critical systems is run through its security analysis algorithms to find signs of unauthorized behavior and positive hits are immediately brought to the attention of operators via an automated alerting mechanism.

It’s a similar value proposition to what ProtectWise Inc. and the recently funded Cyber adAPT, Inc. offer with their respective network monitoring services, but Lanscope has nonetheless managed to set itself apart. That’s thanks in small part to a more than 10-year head start into the market that the company has exploited to build up an impressive client roster that includes the U.S. Congress, Hewlett-Packard Co.  and none other than Cisco itself.

That existing relationship no doubt played a role in the switching giant’s decision to pick Lanscope over its rivals, which will now find themselves up against a much bigger and better-funded rival with a sales channel to match at its back. The $452.5 million price tag of the deal provides a strong indicator of exactly much Cisco is staking on the Georgia outfit’s technology.

The deal will see the Lanscope team move under the wing of its security business to join other recent acquisitions such security assessment provider Neohapsis Inc  and OpenDNS Inc., which the company purchased for an even more staggering $$635 four months ago. The integration should pass smoothly given that Cisco has already incorporated the Georgia outfit’s monitoring software into many of its security solutions, integration that is likely to expand considerably after the the deal officially closes next year.

Image via Geralt