Cisco unveils innovations driving new Security Cloud strategy

Cisco has unveiled its plan for a global, cloud-delivered, integrated platform that secures and connects organizations of any shape and size. The company is designing the Cisco Security Cloud to be the industry’s most open platform, protecting the integrity of the entire IT ecosystem - without public cloud lock-in.

“With the complexity of hybrid work, continued acceleration of cloud adoption, and the ever-advancing threat landscape, organizations are looking for a trusted partner to help them achieve security resilience. We believe Cisco is uniquely positioned due to its scale, breadth of solutions and cloud-neutral business model to meet their needs,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “Cisco is already delivering upon key tenets of our cloud platform vision. We’re excited to increase our innovation velocity to truly deliver on the vision of the Cisco Security Cloud.”

The Security Cloud will provide an integrated experience for securely connecting people and devices everywhere to applications and data anywhere. With unified management, the open platform will provide threat prevention, detection, response, and remediation capabilities at scale. Cisco has been on the journey toward the Security Cloud for some time and is sharing additional progress with new innovations across its security portfolio.

Secure Access

Ushering in the next generation of zero trust, Cisco is building solutions that enable true continuous trusted access by constantly verifying user and device identity, device posture, vulnerabilities, and indicators of compromise. These intelligent checks take place in the background, leaving the user to work without security getting in the way. Cisco is introducing less intrusive methods for risk-based authentication, including the patent-pending Wi-Fi fingerprint as an effective location proxy without compromising user privacy.

To evaluate risk after a user logs in, Cisco is building session trust analysis using the open Shared Signals and Events standards to share information between vendors. Cisco unveiled the first integration of this technology with a demo of Cisco Secure Access by Duo and Box.

“The threat landscape today is evolving faster than ever before,” said Aaron Levie, CEO and Co-founder of Box. “We are excited to strengthen our relationship with Cisco and deliver customers with a powerful new tool that enables them to act on changes in risk dynamically and in near real-time. You can expect to see more innovation and execution from Box and Cisco that help businesses protect their content across any location, application, or device.”

Secure Edge

To radically simplify how organizations connect and protect users, things, and applications, anywhere, Cisco is excited to introduce Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, a unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution. Cisco+ Secure Connect Now is a turnkey offer available in several countries that allows customers to quickly deploy SASE and ease day-to-day operations through a cloud-managed platform. The as-a-service subscription is optimized for value and managed through a unified dashboard.

Cisco offers unmatched breadth and depth in its networking and security capabilities, which is why Telefonica Tech will add Cisco’s SASE suite to its service portfolio.

“As businesses shift to support hybrid work and work from anywhere models, we are committed to helping them adapt to the increased demand for high performing and secure connectivity,” said Rames Sarwat, Director of Cyber Security & Cloud Products and Services at Telefonica Tech. “Together with Cisco, we will offer customers an innovative, managed service that will combine SD-Branch with Cisco SASE to address a complete set of next-generation connectivity and security use cases for the branch and the hybrid worker.” 

Secure Operations

Cisco added a new Talos Intel On-Demand service offering custom research on the threat landscape unique to each organization. To help accelerate incident detection and response, Cisco announced enhancements to Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics with its ability to automatically promote alerts into SecureX and map those alerts to MITRE ATT&CK. This follows the general availability of SecureX device insights to aggregate, correlate, and normalize data about the devices in their environment, and the integrations of Kenna and Secure Endpoint to better prioritize vulnerabilities. Cisco also introduced the Secure Firewall 3100 Series, designed for hybrid work with a new encrypted visibility engine that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect hidden threats.

Simplification

Cisco is introducing simplification across the portfolio with the new unified Secure Client. Streamlining how administrators and users manage endpoints, half of Cisco Secure agents, including AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella, will be unified by mid-year 2022 with additional agents to be added over time. This follows the new cloud-delivered Secure Firewall Management Center, which is enabled through the Cisco Defense Orchestrator and unifies management of both cloud and on-premise firewalls.