Cisco’s platform enhanced with new zero trust, cloud, endpoint and breach defense capabilities
Imagine a world where complexity is no longer the top issue on the minds of CISOs as they think about their security architectures, and a time when they no longer have to stitch together and manage multi-vendor environments.
Cisco announced platform enhancements and services to help CISOs simplify their environments, increase the speed of threat detection and remediation, and protect users anywhere.
Unfortunately, the complexity of managing multi-vendor environments is on the rise for CISOs. According to this year’s CISO Benchmark Study, 79 percent of security professionals surveyed find it very challenging to orchestrate threat response in a multi-vendor environment — up from 74 percent in 2018.
The situation is becoming critical —48 percent are now using time to remediate rather than simply detect or patch as a key success metric.
To reduce complexity, Cisco Security announced enhanced platform capabilities and services for policy, analytics and threat response to deliver better threat protection and continuous trust verification.
Simplifyed investigation and remediation
More than 6,700 customers today are reducing both the time to investigate and the response to threats across multiple security technologies with Cisco Threat Response. As part of our platform approach, we integrate threat response across the Cisco Security portfolio.
Now included is Cisco Stealthwatch, a network traffic analysis product that detects new infections, breach propagation and data exfiltration.
Customers can now simplify threat hunting and investigation and contain threats faster with AMP for Endpoints’ new advanced endpoint detection and response capabilities.
Customers can now isolate a compromised endpoint device as they remediate a security incident or resolve an IT ticket. With an advanced search, customers have all the data they need to achieve a quicker response and ultimately drive down the cost of a breach.
Ben Curry, IT Specialist, The Farmers & Merchants State Bank states: “Threat Response shows off the integration between a lot of Cisco products. It reinforces my belief that Cisco is building the best security stack in the business.”
Chris Hoke, Director of Security Solutions, Sirius Communications states: “We continue to hear clients struggle with being overtooled and under resourced. The depth of integrations across Cisco’s platform both internally and with other manufacturers is critical to being able to do more with what they have.”
Accelerating cloud adoption securely
Customers will benefit from more cloud security capabilities including DNS-layer security, secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall, CASB functionality and interactive threat intelligence. All in the Cisco Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Essentials package.
All packages enable customers to easily integrate Umbrella and Cisco SD-WAN with Anycast routing, so they can secure their network and direct internet access with 100 percent uptime.
Design for the future with a zero trust security leader
Customers will be able to embrace zero trust with confidence for their workforce, workload and workplace.
Cisco was recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers, Q4 2019 report, receiving the highest possible scores in the ZTX strategy, network security, people/workforce security, device security, visibility and analytics, and management and usability criteria.
As Forrester notes, Cisco “excels in Zero Trust with a renewed and targeted focus” and is “well positioned as a prominent Zero Trust player.”
Customers will benefit from platform level integrations such as Duo MFA and AMP for Endpoints, currently in beta, helping customers safeguard against vulnerable or potentially compromised devices with automatic adaptive policy enforcement.
New security services deliver expertise
Customers will be able to call Cisco Talos Incident Response when they need help. Cisco Incident Response capabilities are now part of Cisco Talos, the largest threat intelligence research organization.
By fully combining incident response and retainers into Talos, it increases customers’ access to threat intelligence to feed response plans, preparedness exercises and emergency responses as well as expanded protection from on-the-ground threat intelligence.
Cisco combined its integrated security platform approach with a team of expert cyber investigators to deliver Managed Detection and Response (MDR). The MDR service helps customers make the most of their investment and keep pace with current threats and a rapidly expanding attack surface across cloud, network and endpoints.
It provides them with 24×7 threat monitoring and response to reduce the mean time to detect and contain threats faster with defined, prioritized and consistent investigations and response playbook supported by Cisco Talos threat research.
“Complexity challenges have been an issue for many years. At Cisco, we are focused on addressing this by helping our customers adopt a platform approach to security that can simplify their security operations with products and services that work together, offering a more secure environment,” said Jeff Reed, SVP, Product, Security Business Group, Cisco.
“We are committed to continuing to offer customers new ways to solve their top security challenges.”