Securing Your Future by Innovating Today

By Jeff Reed At a time when cybercrime costs three times more than natural disasters globally1, the demands on security are constantly growing. Whether you’re asked to protect a workforce that roams anywhere, a workplace that is digitized, or workloads that run wherever, your disparate security solutions are creating discord and an untenable level of complexity.
At Cisco, we’ve been on a quest to change that, and we believe we’re uniquely positioned to redefine security. As you’re innovating to build your future, we’re innovating to keep it secure — by creating a comprehensive platform approach and continuously evolving our security technologies.
That’s why I’m excited today to share some of the recent innovations across our security portfolio. With a cloud-powered platform approach in mind, these enhancements are designed to break down silos between SecOps, NetOps, and ITOps and free up your time by:
Simplifying your firewalling experience with more consistent policy management with cloud-native environments and cloud-based logging.
Accelerating your cloud adoption with new secure web gateway and firewall services in the cloud, deployed through a single IPsec tunnel.
Future-proofing your security with an industry-validated zero-trust approach for your workforce, workloads, and workplace, while integrating threat context.
Simplifying your breach defense experience with more visibility and actions for threat response, plus new services delivered by Cisco experts to help augment your team.

Experience the future of firewalling
As you’re moving applications into the cloud, the NetOps‘ job is expanding to include cloud-native firewalls. Securing all control points across this multicloud environment should not feel like reinventing the wheel. We’re simplifying the experience and enabling NetOps to maintain consistent policies across firewalls, and into the cloud, starting with support for AWS, with more cloud providers roadmapped. Additionally, to help you easily maintain consistent policies as you’re adopting SD-WAN, we’ve simplified policy management for Meraki MX, one of our SD-WAN solutions. Just a few clicks, that’s all it takes to seamlessly harmonize policies across your hybrid environment.
We’re also improving visibility and making compliance easier with cloud-based logging for our NGFWs. This new capability aggregates and centralizes the on-prem and cloud logs so you can search, filter, and sort them, accelerating investigations while ensuring your organization complies with industry regulations.
The increased user connectivity to the cloud creates new demands for faster speeds, so we’re raising the bar with our appliances as well. The latest models of our NGFWs offer a 3X performance boost over previous appliances and optimize the performance-to-price ratio to keep your network — and business — running smoothly and securely.
Accelerate cloud adoption securely
To help you transition to the cloud successfully— and protect any user, anywhere they connect to the internet — while saving a considerable amount of resources, we’ve consolidated a broad range of security services into a single, cloud-delivered security solution and dashboard. Alongside DNS-layer security, CASB, and interactive threat intelligence services, we’ve added secure web gateway and firewall services to our cloud security solution to deliver deeper visibility and control over all ports and protocols, even encrypted web traffic.
The secure web gateway (full proxy) provides complete web traffic visibility, control, and protection — with capabilities like decrypting and scanning files on any site, filtering out inappropriate or malicious URLs, sandboxing unknown files, and blocking applications or app functions.
With this comprehensive set of functionalities, you can rely on us for the full security stack at smaller branches as you adopt SD-WAN. A single configuration in our networking product dashboards deploys DNS-layer security across hundreds of network devices, including SD-WAN. Additionally, a single IPsec tunnel deploys secure web gateway and firewall from any network device, including SD-WAN. Our integrated approach and Anycast routing can efficiently protect your branch users, connected devices, and application usage from all internet breakouts with 100% business uptime.
Secure access with a zero-trust approach
We have been working over the past year to create a more comprehensive zero-trust framework. Based on customer feedback, we focused on securing three key pillars: workforce, workloads, and workplace. We are thrilled that Forrester recognized our strides and named Cisco a leader in the recently released Forrester Wave among Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers. As the analyst report noted, “Cisco excels in zero trust with a renewed and targeted focus … and is well-positioned as a prominent zero-trust player.”
We continue to innovate in this space and are reducing risks based on device trust by integrating our threat-detection capabilities with multi-factor authentication. The majority of breaches originate on the endpoint, but what if ITOps could establish trust in a user device before it’s allowed any access to sensitive resources? By safeguarding against vulnerable or compromised endpoints and blocking their access, you’ll be able to better detect and respond to malware threats as well as prevent data breaches.
Adopt breach defense everywhere
Taking endpoint defense one step farther, we added the ability to isolate an endpoint, which stops malware from spreading while giving SecOps time to remediate without losing forensics data, or simply giving ITOps time to troubleshoot an unknown issue. Making breach defense less overwhelming, endpoint isolation empowers incident investigators to uncover endpoint data that wasn’t available before — using advanced search with more than 300 query parameters, such as listing applications with high memory utilization.
Malware is also a growing problem at the network level because adversaries have learned to hide behind encrypted traffic. We’ve extended the capability to analyze encrypted traffic behavior into the cloud, providing higher fidelity of threat protection and enabling cryptographic compliance. At the same time, we’re simplifying investigations, giving you deeper visibility at multiple layers, and helping you respond quicker across different vectors by integrating network security analytics with our unified threat response application.
If you need help preparing for and responding to attacks, you can augment your team with our incident response services, now part of Talos. You know Talos as the team who’s constantly researching new threats on your behalf, and now they can integrate that intel even faster across our entire portfolio — benefitting not only retainer customers but everyone. For even leaner teams that need next-level support, we’re adding managed threat detection and response services to help you leverage your Cisco Security investments 24x7x365.
Several of these innovations are industry firsts, and we’re excited to offer customers new ways to better manage their growing business demands. I encourage you to take a closer look at these enhancements and discover how they can make your security an enabler rather than a barrier.
Get Started
Ready to experience for yourself how Cisco can simplify your experience, accelerate your success, and secure your future?
Simplify security and respond to threats with a few clicks using the free Cisco Threat Response application, available for all our solutions as part of our platform approach.
Experience the future of firewalling — see how easy it is to harmonize firewall policies with a free trial to Cisco Defense Orchestrator and learn more about the new Firepower Next-Generation Firewall.
Accelerate your cloud adoption, starting with a free trial of Umbrella, our comprehensive cloud-security solution.
Start with securing your workforce with a zero-trust approach using a Duo free trial.
Enable SecOps to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more efficiently with a free trial to Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints, and get better visibility into encrypted traffic with a free trial to Stealthwatch, our network traffic security analytics solution.
Augment your team and improve your readiness for attacks with Talos Incident Response and our managed security

Source:
1Allianz Risk Barometer, 2019

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Source:: Cisco Security Notice