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OpenDNS - the resolver that became a security product
A public DNS resolver acquired by Cisco and rebuilt as Umbrella.
OpenDNS ran a public recursive resolver and was acquired by Cisco, becoming the basis of Cisco Umbrella. Its significance is the move it demonstrated: a resolver that answers queries is also a device that sees every name a network asks for, before any connection is made.
OpenDNS was founded on 1 November 2005 by David Ulevitch, who had been in the industry since junior high school - working at a San Diego internet provider that was a founding member of Packet Clearing House while it built one of the first internet exchange points. As a student in 2001 he had already created EveryDNS, an authoritative service he later sold to Dyn.
The original proposition was a free public resolver that was faster than the one your provider gave you and that corrected typos and blocked phishing sites. That is a consumer product, and the interesting move came around 2009, when the same infrastructure was pointed at enterprises: every device on a network asks the resolver where things are, so a resolver sees intent before a connection is made, and can refuse it.
Umbrella was the result - enforcement that follows a device off the corporate network, because a laptop in a hotel still has to resolve names. That is the argument for putting a control at the naming layer rather than at the perimeter, and it arrived before most organisations accepted that the perimeter had stopped being where their users were.
Cisco acquired the company in 2015 for 635 million dollars, by which point it ran 25 data centres and competed with providers, carriers and Google. Ulevitch's own comment on the sale is worth preserving because it is unusually direct about the difference between two things founders normally blur: they had entertained and rejected other offers, and, in his words, they did not decide to sell OpenDNS - they decided to sell OpenDNS to Cisco.
- Cisco Umbrella - the same lineage under its current name
- OpenDNS: founded 1 November 2005 by David Ulevitch in San Francisco, providing resolution with phishing protection and optional content filtering, plus the Umbrella cloud security suite; acquired by Cisco in 2015
- David Ulevitch: entered the internet industry in junior high school at the San Diego provider Electriciti, then a founding member of Packet Clearing House while it built one of the first internet exchange points; created EveryDNS in May 2001 as a student, sold it to Dyn, and later became senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Security
- Cisco to acquire OpenDNS for 635 million dollars: the company operated 25 data centres worldwide and competed with internet providers, carriers and Google; Ulevitch wrote that they had previously entertained and rejected other offers - we did not decide to sell OpenDNS, we decided to sell OpenDNS to Cisco