Cisco announces its intent to design its Security Cloud as an open platform

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 are 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.

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.

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.