‘Security no longer has a perimeter’

Cisco this week unveiled a range of innovations designed to radically simplify and deliver end-to-end security, across users, devices, networks, applications and data. At the RSA Conference 2021, hosted by Dell Technologies subsidiary RSA Security, Cisco chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins called for “visibility across endpoints, users and applications as well as securing critical control points with continuous passwordless authentication”.

“Security has to be at the heart of everything in the new world we live in,” he said. “We believe it needs to be done with a platform approach that is simple, comprehensive and based on intelligence. There is really no perimeter in the enterprise to defend anymore.”

Announcements at the event included improvements in Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with greater visibility across network, endpoint and cloud. New innovations expanded Cisco’s vision for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), with enhanced threat detection in the cloud.

According to Robbins, the world has shifted towards a more distributed workforce and, with recent global events, hybrid work is here to stay. Users now expect to connect from anywhere and on any device, while security teams have the same complex, piecemeal and time-consuming solutions. 

“It is time to rethink security,” he said.

Gee Rittenhouse, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Secure, elaborated: “Organisations are increasingly looking to adopt end-to-end security architectures to support this new way of working, and we think it’s critical to take a platform approach to simplify security, network, and IT operations as customers embark on digital transformation. Since it was launched last year at RSA, more than 7,000 customers are using Cisco’s SecureX platform to unlock value from existing security solutions.”

This week’s announcements on the expansion of Cisco’s SASE architecture, as supplied by Cisco, included:

• Rapid Deployment of Cloud Security across SD-WAN: New integration between Cisco Umbrella and Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki extends the SD-WAN fabric to the cloud with the click of a button and includes intelligent path selection to enable customers with secure access and the best user experiences when connecting to cloud applications.
• Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) in cloud-delivered firewall: Umbrella’s cloud-delivered firewall now includes an additional layer of protection with Snort 3 IPS, backed by Cisco Talos, one of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams in the world.
• New Packages for Best Protection and Value: Umbrella’s new Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) Advantage package reduces the complexities of purchasing and unifying point solutions by offering a complete set of security capabilities in a single subscription
• Cisco Secure Firewall Cloud-Native: Purpose-built for Kubernetes environments, Cisco Secure Firewall Cloud Native is developer-friendly, and the most elastic firewall Cisco has ever built.

To learn more about Cisco’s solutions to simplify security, visit cisco.com/go/security.