Security Resilience for a Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Future

Eighty-one percent of organizations told Gartner they have a multi-cloud strategy. As more organizations subscribe to cloud offerings for everything from hosted data centers to enterprise applications, the topology of the typical IT environment grows increasingly complex.

Now add the proliferation of hybrid work environments, the rapid ascendance of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and an increasingly sophisticated and malicious cyber threat landscape, and it becomes immediately clear that protecting the integrity of your IT ecosystem is now a next-level problem.

In an unpredictable world, organizations everywhere are investing in initiatives that will infuse resilience into every aspect of their business, from finance to supply chains. To protect those investments, we believe they also need to invest in security resilience — the ability to protect your business against threats and disruption, and to respond to changes confidently so you can emerge even stronger.

This requires a next-level solution.

That’s why we’re building the Cisco Security Cloud — a global, cloud-delivered, integrated platform that secures and connects organizations of any shape and size. This cloud-native service is aimed at helping you protect users, devices and applications across your entire ecosystem. It will be a comprehensive, integrated set of services designed to scale with your business.

An open security platform that eliminates vendor lock-in

The Cisco Security Cloud will directly address these challenges by bringing together the depth and breadth of the Cisco security portfolio, and is:

• Cloud-native and multi-cloud – Securely connecting users, devices, and IoT to systems, apps, and data – across hybrid environments, optimizing performance and providing a frictionless experience by placing security closer to users, their data, and their applications. 
• Unified – Bringing together core capabilities including policy management, management consoles, and dashboards for better end-to-end security efficacy. 
• Simplified – Reducing friction for users and IT by consolidating endpoint agents and having a relentless focus on user experience.
• AI/ML-driven – Leveraging massive volumes of telemetry across our portfolio, from the devices and networks we protect, enabling better detection, altering, and automation to improve the efficacy of the platform. 
• Open and extensible – Providing APIs for integration and to support a rich developer ecosystem and marketplace.

Join our innovative security journey

We have been on this journey for years. We at Cisco Secure have been delivering key components of this security cloud, and those solutions already protect 840,000 networks, 67 million mailboxes and 87 million endpoints for customers the world over.

And today at the RSA Conference, we’re taking the next step by announcing our latest innovations addressing four key areas:

The move to hybrid, multi-cloud environments

Today we are announcing Cisco’s turnkey Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, to simplify how organizations connect and protect users, devices, data, and applications, anywhere. Built on the Meraki platform, and available as a subscription, it unifies security and networking operations, as well as client connectivity and visibility into a single cloud-native solution, that can be set up in minutes.

The move to hybrid work

Cisco is continuing to build out continuous trusted access solutions that that constantly verify user and device identity, device posture, vulnerabilities, and indicators of compromise.  To evaluate risk after authentication, location information is critical, but we think GPS data is too intrusive. So today we are introducing a new patent-pending Wi-Fi Fingerprint capability (available in Public Preview this summer) to understand user location without compromising location privacy. We are also announcing new Session Trust Analysis capabilities to evaluate risk after login by using open standards for shared signals and events. We will unveil the first integration of this technology with a demo of Duo MFA and Box this week. 

Addressing advanced threats

As organizations become more interconnected as ecosystems, and attacks become more sophisticated and personalized, it is no longer adequate to evaluate risk and threats generically across the industry. Organizations need deeper levels of advice and expertise.  We are excited to launch the new Talos Intelligence On-Demand service, available now, offering custom research on the threat landscape unique to each organization. Talos Intelligence on Demand can assist with custom research, and brief our customers on the unique risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for their organizations.

The need for simplification

Simplification is critical to driving better security efficacy. To that end, we are excited to announce the new Cisco Secure Client (available this summer), combining AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint, and Umbrella, to simplify how administrators and users manage endpoints. This follows the launch of the new cloud-delivered Secure Firewall Management Center, which unifies management for both cloud and on-premise firewalls.

There is more work to be done, of course, and today’s announcements at the RSA Conference are the latest advances in support of this vision. We will continue working on all aspects of the Security Cloud to improve our customers’ security resilience in the face of unprecedented change and increasing threats. Because next-level problems deserve next-level solutions. 

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