Cisco has announced its vision for a worldwide, cloud-based, integrated platform that secures and connects businesses of all sizes. The Cisco Security Cloud is being built to become one of the industry’s most open platforms. According to Cisco, it would ensure the integrity of the whole IT ecosystem while avoiding public cloud lock-in.
Listen to this news article
“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,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “We believe Cisco is uniquely positioned due to its scale, breadth of solutions and cloud-neutral business model to meet their needs. 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 Cisco Security Cloud would offer a unified experience for securely connecting people and devices from all over the world to applications and data. The open platform will deliver threat prevention, detection, response, and remediation capabilities at scale thanks to unified management. Cisco has been on the road to their Cisco Security Cloud for a while and is now revealing more progress with new security technologies throughout its portfolio.
Secure Access
Cisco is developing solutions that provide continuous trusted access by continually checking user and device identification, device posture, vulnerabilities, and signs of compromise, ushering in the next generation of zero trust. These “clever” checks run in the background, allowing the user to focus on their task without worrying about security. Cisco is introducing less intrusive risk-based authentication approaches, such as the patent-pending Wi-Fi fingerprint, which serves as an effective location proxy without jeopardizing user privacy.
Cisco is developing session trust analysis utilizing the open Shared Signals and Events standards to communicate information amongst vendors to evaluate risk once a user registers in. With a demonstration of Cisco Secure Access by Duo and Box, Cisco announced the first integration of this technology.
“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
Cisco is launching Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, a single Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution, to drastically simplify how enterprises connect and safeguard users, devices, and applications, everywhere. Cisco+ Secure Connect Now is a turnkey product provided in a number of countries. It would enable users to swiftly implement SASE and simplify day-to-day operations with a cloud-managed platform. The value of the as-a-service subscription is maximized, and it’s all controlled through a single dashboard.
Cisco’s networking and security capabilities are unrivaled, which is why Telefonica Tech is adding 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 has launched a new Cisco Talos Intel On-Demand service that provides personalized threat research tailored to each organization’s needs. Cisco introduced upgrades to Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, including the ability to instantly promote alarms into SecureX and map those alerts to MITRE ATT&CK, to help speed issue identification and response.
This comes on the heels of the public release of SecureX device insights, which allows users to collect, correlate, and normalize data about the devices in their environment, as well as the Kenna and Secure Endpoint integrations, which allow users to better prioritize vulnerabilities.
Cisco also unveiled the Secure Firewall 3100 Series, which is built for hybrid work and features a new encrypted visibility engine that detects hidden threats using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Simplification
With their new unified Secure Client, Cisco intends to bring simplicity to its whole offering. Half of Cisco Secure agents, including AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella, will be unified by mid-year 2022, simplifying how administrators and users manage endpoints. Additional agents will be introduced over time.
This comes after Cisco Defense Orchestrator enabled the new cloud-delivered Secure Firewall Control Center, which combines management of cloud and on-premises firewalls.
Executive Summary
-
The Cisco Security Cloud would offer a unified experience for securely connecting people and devices from all over the world to applications and data
-
It would ensure the integrity of the whole IT ecosystem while avoiding public cloud lock-in.
-
These “clever” checks run in the background, allowing the user to focus on their task without worrying about security
-
Cisco is introducing less intrusive risk-based authentication approaches, such as the patent-pending Wi-Fi fingerprint, which serves as an effective location proxy without jeopardizing user privacy
-
Cisco is launching Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, a single Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution, to drastically simplify how enterprises connect and safeguard users, devices, and applications, everywhere
-
The value of the as-a-service subscription is maximized, and it’s all controlled through a single dashboard
-
Cisco has launched a new Cisco Talos Intel On-Demand service that provides personalized threat research tailored to each organization’s needs.
-
This comes on the heels of the public release of SecureX device insights, which allows users to collect, correlate, and normalize data about the devices in their environment.
-
Cisco intends to bring simplicity to its whole offering with the new unified Secure Client
-
Half of Cisco Secure agents, including AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella, will be unified by mid-year 2022, simplifying how administrators and users manage endpoints
