Cisco Systems said Sunday that it had agreed to buy Meraki for about $ 1.2 billion, as the networking titan continues to bolster its cloud computing services.

By buying Meraki, a privately held company backed by the likes of Google and Sequoia Partners, Cisco will add products that allow networks to be controlled through the Internet.

This is the latest example of technology companies seeking to harness the popularity of cloud computing, which uses remote networks of computers to provide a host of services.

Meraki, which was founded in 2006 by graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focuses on midsized companies that otherwise could not afford to run their own networking and security services.

“These companies have the same IT needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex IT solutions,” Rob Soderbery, a senior vice president in Cisco’s enterprise networking group, said in a statement. “Meraki’s solution was built from the ground up optimized for cloud, with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.”

Cisco has been a particularly active buyer this year, having announced eight acquisitions since February. The most recent was a $ 130 million deal for Cloupia, a provider of back-end cloud services technology, last week.

Meraki, which is based in San Francisco, will become part of a new cloud networking group within Cisco.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s 2013 fiscal year.

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