Cisco has unveiled its plan for a global, cloud-delivered, integrated security and networking service for organisations of any shape and size. The Cisco Security Cloud will be an open platform, protecting the integrity of the entire IT ecosystem – without public cloud lock-in.
“Resilience has always been a corporate mandate. In addition to operational, financial, and supply chain resilience, there is another critical imperative in today’s world: security resilience,” says Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “With the complexity of hybrid architectures and the advanced threat landscape, Cisco believes security resilience requires a unified platform for end-to-end security across hybrid multi-cloud environments.”
The Security Cloud will provide the complete capabilities needed for securely connecting people and devices everywhere to applications and data anywhere, and for threat prevention, detection, response, and remediation at scale. With unified management and policies, the Security Cloud will also have open APIs to enable third party solutions and a security marketplace.
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.
Secure the 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.
Secure Operations
Cisco added a new Talos Intelligence 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 with additional elements to be added.
This follows the new cloud-delivered Secure Firewall Management Center which unifies management of both cloud and on-premise firewalls.