Cisco Live – Cisco’s annual education and training conference – was held in Las Vegas and attended by tens of thousands of customers, partners, resellers, press and analysts from countries worldwide, all of whom were ready to hear about the company’s future.
Their overall theme of innovation – while focusing on areas of the Internet of Things, collaboration, the future of the network – honed down onto two major areas: security and digital-ready networks.
The world is focused on cybersecurity, and the Cisco Live C-Scape “mini conference” was no exception. The company made several announcements surrounding security efforts and even coined a new phrase, “security effectiveness gap,” pledging to lead the way in closing it. According to Patrick Moorehead of Forbes, this is a smart move because there is a distinct “need in the market that is not being met: a true vendor-neutral security orchestrator.”
According to Cisco, the gap arises from the complexity that exists when an enterprise implements a large, multi-faceted variety of disparate security solutions, and these solutions are trying to connect and work with each other. Here are the services that Cisco announced with the goal of increasing capabilities and reducing complexity:
Cisco Umbrella Roaming – designed to eliminate off-network blind spots and defend employees from security threats no matter where they are working. In order to take advantage of this a centralized cloud-delivered protection, customers must be running Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN solution.
Cisco Umbrella Branch – designed to give businesses that use the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) better control over their guest WiFi at branches.
Cisco Stealthwatch Learning Network License – designed to increase Cisco ISR for branch protection by identifying and monitoring anomalies and suspicious activity in network traffic, as well as analyzing it for threats. The work is offloaded to an ISR device to minimize the traffic load.
Cisco Defense Orchestrator – designed to enable users to easily and effectively manage a large security infrastructure and policies across Cisco security products in disparate locations across thousands of devices, all through a simple, cloud-based console.
Cisco Meraki MX Security Appliances with Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and Threat Grid —designed to simplify threat protection for a distributed enterprise and entirely managed in the cloud. Satellite offices will be able to cross-check files against cloud databases while identifying and blocking malicious content and increasing WAN traffic.
Cisco Security Services for Digital Transformation – designed to assist organizations determine security readiness and, subsequently, recommending strategies for improvement.
As Moorehead pointed out, “if Cisco’s new line of products and services work as advertised, both simplifying and strengthening threat protection, Cisco might just have the network security aspect on lockdown, at least at the core.” By rallying customers, vendors, partners, developers and many others during Cisco Live, the company has a strong head start.
