Cisco will buy privately held net security firm OpenDNS for $635m in cash, to make good its cloud security portfolio and boost the networking giant's "security everywhere" approach.

Announcing the deal today, the leviathan is offering the bundle of cash alongside assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for OpenDNS' staff. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2016.

The acquisition is intended to improve broad visibility and threat intelligence for Cisco, via OpenDNS' cloud platform.

The OpenDNS team will be assimilated into Cisco's security grouping.

Cisco states:

The burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything are expected to spur the connection of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020, creating a vast new wave of opportunities for security breaches across networks.

"As more people, processes, data and things become connected, opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks," said Hilton Romanski, Cisco's chief technology and strategy officer. ®