Organizations today face significant challenges. Attackers are exploiting the weakest links in the network: unsecured users, devices, and workloads. This threat landscape has become more complex as we move from traditional data centers to distributed environments where protecting data spread across multiple touchpoints becomes more complex.
To address these threats, many organizations use multiple security tools, resulting in siled teams, technology stacks, and management systems that hinder effective security. This piecemeal approach results in unnecessary costs, long deployment times, inconsistent security, and critical gaps.
Security products that do not integrate with or benefit from each other exacerbate these problems. For example, network security managers struggle to navigate disparate teams and tools to deploy policies effectively. Additionally, customers often underutilize security tools, which often results in poor security hygiene and misconfiguration, increasing the risk of breaches. Manually monitoring multiple tools makes it impossible for organizations to proactively predict issues that lead to operational problems. As a result, the burden is shifted to customers to understand the gaps and figure out how best to use the tools.
Inconsistent security policies, siled management, lack of unified visibility, risk of misconfiguration, and lack of cybersecurity skills are all significant challenges facing organizations. As organizations face these challenges, findings from the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Report highlight their urgency. According to the report, the average time from initial access to ransomware deployment has decreased from 1637 hours (about 1 week and 2 months) to 92 hours (less than 4 days) by 2023. This dramatic reduction means that organizations now spend significantly less time deploying ransomware. Countering threats makes effective, integrated security solutions more important than ever.
Without a centralized platform, it is difficult to get a holistic view of security. Manually identifying incorrect configurations is error-prone and can lead to violations. They lack the skills, time, and resources to fully utilize security features and maximize ROI. Customers must implement best practices, which requires specialized knowledge and time. Multiple security products make it time-consuming to resolve access or policy issues. Administrators spend an inordinate amount of time creating similar policies across different platforms. Operational issues are often resolved reactively, resulting in downtime and suboptimal performance. Non-actionable alerts and overwhelming data cause analysis paralysis and a loss of urgency, hindering decision-making. While we can never completely escape distributed enforcement points, there is a significant opportunity for the security industry to provide consistent security across these various touchpoints.
A unified security platform aims to alleviate these challenges by providing a comprehensive view of the security environment, enabling consistent policy enforcement, simplifying troubleshooting, and providing actionable insights with the help of AI. This reduces cognitive load and reliance on specialized skills. When considering Unified Security Management (USM), the goal is to have a seamless management experience.
To meet the unique needs of different organizations and support a variety of network firewall configurations, our strategy focuses on three core goals: simplify operations, enhance security, and improve clarity. We aim to simplify security management processes, strengthen defenses with advanced zero trust and vulnerability protection, and deliver clear, actionable insights through AI-driven intelligence. This focused effort is designed to deliver more intuitive, robust, and user-friendly security solutions.
Customer Outcomes with Security Cloud Control
We’re excited to launch AIOps, which provides a groundbreaking way to increase operational efficiency and enhance security. AIOps prevents downtime and enhances network performance by solving critical IT challenges such as misconfigurations and traffic spikes. AIOps provides predictive insights and automation that helps administrators increase security and reduce costs. We are introducing key capabilities such as policy analysis and optimization, best practice recommendations, traffic insights, and capacity forecasting. By integrating AIOps into our services, we are adopting a more intelligent and proactive methodology to protect and optimize the performance and security of our network infrastructure.
To learn more about AIOps, check out this blog.
Best practice recommendations: Drive administrators to provide a better security posture
Predictive Insights with AIOps
Benefits of AIOps
Our solutions are designed to accommodate management of a variety of form factors in firewalls, ensuring comprehensive security from the ground up to the cloud. Seamlessly integrates with a variety of deployment models, including physical and virtual firewalls (Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense), Multicloud Defense, Hypershield, and Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA).
This versatility simplifies security infrastructure management, making it easier to maintain a robust and adaptable defense system across your entire network from a single location.
Our partnership with Splunk represents a significant leap forward in streamlining security operations. Integration with Splunk improves oversight and monitoring capabilities for both cloud-based and on-site firewalls. Leverage Splunk’s powerful data processing, analytics, and real-time logging capabilities to provide a rich, immediate, and comprehensive view of your security posture.
This joint effort simplifies security operations management and provides security operations center (SOC) teams with a superior, simple, and effective way to secure their digital environments.
We are introducing a unified dashboard that allows customers to gain a real-time, holistic view of their entire network and cloud security ecosystem. Customers can efficiently manage tens of thousands of security devices by coordinating multiple tenants under a centralized global administrator.
Integrated dashboard: A comprehensive view of firewall and security services
We are further simplifying administrators’ operations with the Firewall AI Assistant. Revolutionizes network security by solving the complexities of firewall rule management. Many organizations deal with thousands of rules, some of which are outdated or conflicting, making firewall maintenance a security risk. Gartner highlights the need for this AI-based simplification, noting that misconfigurations could cause 99% of firewall breaches by 2023. Customers can ask the assistant to explain the intent of the policy and help create rules.
AI assistant for firewalls: Rule Analysis
AI assistant for firewalls: Create rule
A key innovation in the security strategy is the implementation of seamless object sharing, which plays a pivotal role in maintaining consistent protection across hybrid networks. This feature makes it easy to deploy network objects across both on-premises firewalls and multi-cloud defenses. The primary goal is to protect application and workload data wherever it resides by enabling administrators to deploy consistent policies across diverse environments. This approach strengthens the security posture of hybrid environments, simplifies change management processes, and reduces the likelihood of errors, contributing to a more secure, effective, and resilient IT ecosystem.
Consistent policy enforcement: Share network objects across on-premises and cloud environments
We are committed to continuously improving our services and expanding our global presence to better serve our customers. In conclusion, our vision extends beyond simply providing tools: we strive to revolutionize the user experience.
Through a fusion of cutting-edge technology and intuitive design, our goal is to create a supportive environment for administrators that is both operationally efficient and secure. We are committed to easing the burden on our customers by providing an integrated security platform that helps them achieve the best possible security posture.
Stay secure!
We’d like to hear your thoughts. Ask questions, comment below, and stay connected with Cisco Security on social media!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
linkedin
share:
