For some time, we have been talking about how the digital transformation would be an accelerant that would cause companies to rethink old models, customer experiences and the workplace. It was always thought to be a milestone in the future that businesses would take incremental steps towards. But the pandemic changed everything and has dramatically accelerated the IT agenda.

Overnight entire business models shifted to adapt to a world that became almost entirely virtual, and companies had to enable remote work at a scale that previously seemed unimaginable. While this has ensured a level of business continuity, it also dramatically increased organizations’ attack surfaces. This new reality has tested our digital readiness in a way no one could have anticipated, and the need for a new and innovative approach to security has never been more vital.

Cisco has been on a multi-year journey to give customers the industry’s best protection and simple user experience. It started by building the broadest portfolio in the market that spans network, endpoint, cloud and applications. We then integrated that backend with our market-leading threat intelligence from Cisco Talos so that our products talk to each other and can see and respond to the threats faster. But we knew that in order for customers to feel the value of the integration, they needed a radically different experience on the frontend where they were doing their daily work and making critical decisions.

So, in February at the RSA Conference, we introduced Cisco SecureX, a cloud-native platform that connects our integrated security portfolio and customers’ security infrastructure to provide a simple and  consistent experience across network, endpoint, cloud and applications. We knew it would be transformative for the industry, but we could never have predicted just how important it would be to security and IT professionals at this very moment.

Today, businesses are operating in a dynamic environment at a timescale that was previously thought to be impossible. This is driving the need for massive simplification and automation, which are the tenets that SecureX was built on.

The industry has come to recognize that complexity is a problem, and 81 percent of security professionals find managing a multi-vendor security environment challenging. SecureX simplifies the customer experience by providing a unified view of customers’ environments, so they no longer have to jump between multiple dashboards, manage conflicting alerts, or policies. Furthermore, SecureX comes built-into every Cisco Security product and offers out-of-the-box interoperability so when situations like the pandemic arise, companies can be agile and scale in a timely fashion.

The ability to quickly deploy and get results from security solutions has also been brought into focus during this current crisis. Repetitive and manual tasks cost teams valuable time and leave room for human error. With SecureX, customers can automate workflows across security products from Cisco and third parties and can handle tasks like threat hunting; identifying device vulnerabilities; and optimizing network configuration.

Some day in the near future, the pandemic will be part of our past. But the way business is done will be forever altered. This is a new and dynamic world, and whether it is a pandemic or something else, there will always be some obstacle for us to overcome. While we can’t plan for every scenario, we have an opportunity to transform the workplace as we know it and that means having a security platform that will protect what’s now and what’s next.

SecureX will be generally available at the end of this month. To learn more visit, cisco.com/go/securex.

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