Cisco, a provider of enterprise networking and security, announced plans for a global, cloud-delivered, integrated platform that secures and connects organizations of any size and shape.
The Cisco Security Cloud is being designed 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 offer a unified experience for securely connecting people and devices everywhere to applications and data anywhere. The open platform will provide threat prevention, detection, response, and remediation capabilities at scale through unified management. Cisco has been on the path to the Security Cloud for some time and is now sharing additional progress with new security innovations across its portfolio.
Cisco is developing solutions that enable true continuous trusted access by constantly verifying user and device identity, device posture, vulnerabilities, and indicators of compromise, ushering in the next generation of zero trust. These intelligent checks occur in the background, allowing the user to work without interruption from security. Cisco is introducing less intrusive methods for risk-based authentication, such as the patent-pending Wi-Fi fingerprint, which can serve as an effective location proxy without jeopardizing user privacy.
Cisco is developing session trust analysis using the open Shared Signals and Events standards to share information between vendors to evaluate risk after a user logs in. Cisco demonstrated the first integration of this technology, 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.”
Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, a unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution, is being introduced to radically simplify how organizations connect and protect users, things, and applications anywhere. Cisco+ Secure Connect Now is a turnkey offer available in a number of countries that enables customers to quickly deploy SASE and simplify day-to-day operations via a cloud-managed platform. The value of the as-a-service subscription is optimized and managed through a unified dashboard.
“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.”
Cisco has launched a new Talos Intel On-Demand service, which provides custom research on the threat landscape specific to each organization. Cisco announced enhancements to Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics to help accelerate incident detection and response, including the ability to automatically promote alerts into SecureX and map those alerts to MITRE ATT&CK. This comes on the heels of the general release of SecureX device insights, which aggregate, correlate, and normalize data about the devices in their environment, as well as the integrations of Kenna and Secure Endpoint to better prioritize vulnerabilities. Cisco also introduced the Secure Firewall 3100 Series, which is intended for hybrid use and features a new encrypted visibility engine that detects hidden threats using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
With the introduction of the new unified Secure Client, Cisco is simplifying its portfolio. Half of Cisco Secure agents, including AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella, will be unified by mid-year 2022, streamlining how administrators and users manage endpoints, with additional agents added over time. This is in addition to the new cloud-delivered Secure Firewall Management Center, which is accessible via the Cisco Defense Orchestrator and unifies cloud and on-premise firewall management.
