Customers need simplified security platform solutions for XDR, SASE, and Zero Trust

It’s no secret that cybersecurity has become increasingly difficult in recent years. We often blame an expanded attack surface and more sophisticated attackers. While they certainly play a substantial role, today’s security setbacks are also a byproduct of the rising complexity faced by defenders. There are just too many disparate, siloed security products for organizations to use effectively against threats that are growing in quantity and severity.

“Positive shifts in digital transformation have made it evident that security technologies in siloes contribute to more complexity,” said Michael Degroote, infrastructure consultant at Mohawk Industries. “Our teams are losing precious time connecting the dots and integrating all these tools that don’t work with one another.”

Security professionals today are inundated with alerts and can’t keep up with the very technology designed to help them. They’re spending a disproportionate amount of time trying to manually integrate different solutions from various vendors. According to our 2020 CISO Benchmark Report, due to a lack of time and resources, today’s organizations are only able to remediate 50% of legitimate security threats. Doing more of what we have been doing as an industry clearly is not going to help. It’s time to think differently.

Cisco Secure and simple

At Cisco, we’ve been working on this challenge for several years, and recently launched our Cisco SecureX platform as part of the solution. With Cisco SecureX, organizations can easily address a wide range of use cases, including SecOps, NetOps, and ITOps, using technologies from both Cisco and third parties. This results in a more cohesive and collaborative approach to security. Cisco SecureX makes security a more holistic and natural extension of our customers’ environments, removing barriers, accelerating response, and streamlining operations.

But just as a team is only as strong as its weakest player, a platform is only as strong as its least effective pillar. We therefore strive to add only the most effective technologies to our roster. Our Cisco Secure portfolio is the broadest in the industry, covering every threat vector and access point with leading technologies. It covers you across the network, cloud, users and endpoints, and applications. The SecureX platform is made better by each product, and in turn, each product is made better by being a part of the platform.

On our way to becoming the world’s largest cybersecurity company, we innovated, built, partnered, and acquired a lot of security products. Our portfolio grew until we counted 83 different names and variations! So in addition to making our technology easier to use through the SecureX platform, we have also made it easier to find with an updated, simplified naming architecture under our Cisco Secure brand.

Additionally, we are aligning our newly named products under several key approaches that are driving our customers’ security strategies – including XDR, SASE, and Zero Trust. We hope that our new product naming helps you more easily determine the right mix of technologies to address these critical areas and build greater resiliency for the future.

SecureX – Setting the XDR standard  

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is a new approach that delivers visibility into data across networks, clouds, endpoints, and applications while applying analytics and automation to response. Our SecureX platform plays an important role in organizations’ move to XDR.

As part of the platform, Cisco Secure Network Analytics provides enterprise-wide visibility and real-time threat detection, while Cisco Secure Endpoint stops attacks with cloud-delivered endpoint protection. Additionally, Cisco Secure Email combats phishing, business email compromise, ransomware, and spam. These technologies work together – and with other solutions – to collaboratively secure an organization’s entire infrastructure from a wide variety of threat vectors.

A platform approach takes you further

Networking and security are becoming increasingly intertwined, as organizations transition to multi-cloud environments and embrace a secure access service edge (SASE) model. As the world’s largest networking and security company, Cisco is well-positioned to lead this evolution to SASE. With data and employees becoming more distributed, our technologies, delivered via a platform, help to securely connect any user or device to any application, whether it’s in the data center or cloud.

And of course, zero trust is a comprehensive approach to securing all access across your networks, applications, and environment – including access from users, computers, phones, IoT devices, cloud applications, and more. Our platform offers a zero-trust strategy across your workforce, workloads, and workplace.

An ecosystem of complementary solutions

With an integrated platform, you can unify your security, simplify your operations, and maximize the potential of each of your solutions. The technologies highlighted above represent some of the key drivers of our platform. They are further strengthened by:

• Additional capabilities in our Cisco Secure portfolio
• Other Cisco technologies including our Enterprise Networking Solutions
• Over 170 third-party technology integrations
• A wide range of Security Services
• The unrivaled threat intelligence of Cisco Talos

MEDIAPRO, a leader in the European audiovisual sector, has leveraged Cisco’s platform approach to reduce its threat detection time by 90 percent. “Each of the Cisco security solutions [is] very powerful, but all of them combined and overseen by Talos is simply amazing,” said MEDIAPRO’s telecom engineering deputy director, Laura Juarez Ramallo.

These are the kinds of customer results we are aiming for with Cisco SecureX and our updated portfolio. It’s time for the industry to view security not as a mixed bag of point solutions, but as an open, cohesive ecosystem of complementary technologies all working together for the greater good. And as we’ve learned from our customers, we need to keep things simple in order to keep them secure.

Discover what makes Cisco SecureX different, and learn more about our simplified product renaming.

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