Last week, for the fourth time in the last five years, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) was recognized as the top solution in the Trust Awards category for Best NAC Solution at the 2020 SC Awards. The announcement was made on Tuesday, February 25, 2020 during the 24^th annual SC Awards gala in San Francisco, presented by SC Media, a CyberRisk Alliance company.

Receiving this award during the RSA Conference, where the world goes to talk security, is a great achievement and a testament to our team, which has been pushing innovation within ISE and leading the network access control (NAC) market for almost ten years. We thank SC Media for this honor, and we see this award as further validation that Cisco ISE is the linchpin solution for zero trust in the workplace, in both IT and OT environments.

How did we do it?

Winning this award is no small feat. SC Media has been arming cybersecurity professionals with unbiased information and analysis for over thirty years. They are respected in the industry, and here at Cisco.

When asked why Cisco, and why ISE, Illena Armstrong, VP, editorial, SC Media said – “Our judges considered many strong candidates this year for the Trust Awards category, but a select few stood out, excelling in key areas such as functionality, innovation, scalability, ease of use, cost of ownership, return on investment, and customer friendliness. Cisco (and Identity Services Engine) truly emerged as a heavy hitter in a crowded field of players.”

Garnering these accolades from the market and your peers is always great. But at Cisco, when we win, our customers win, because we know we are solving their top security challenges, and that is awesome! Cisco ISE has been helping customers gain the visibility they need to enable secure access and control since 2011. This level of continual innovation only furthers the endorsement of our more than 30,000 customers around the globe.

According to Shannon Cranko, Principal Engineer with Dimension Data, Cisco ISE “is the most comprehensive and complete NAC product that exists, with the ability to scale without buying additional products and licensing.”

What makes ISE so cool?

SC Media attributed this award in part to Cisco ISE’s extensive ecosystem for automated solution integration – with technologies such as Cisco Stealthwatch as well as third-party solutions. Through our standards-based integration platform, called pxGrid, ISE adds an actionable arm of policy enforcement to passive security solutions, accelerating their value and enabling an unprecedented level of dynamic threat containment to limit the lateral movement of threats like ransomware.

According to SC Media, “Cisco ISE users can expect a positive impact on economics and an impressive return on investment.” It cites a Forrester report, which found that organizations using ISE have seen savings of about $1.9 million, and that some have achieved 120 percent ROI with a payback period of just 12 months.

Protecting the future with ISE

As with most Cisco Security solutions, ISE is highly scalable, supporting a staggering 2 million concurrent endpoint sessions. Achieving scale is critical as our customers take on IoT and are bringing more and more connected devices into both their IT and OT environments.

Also, ISE is not just enabling zero trust in the workplace with secure access and control for today’s network. As our customers migrate to embrace the ease of automation and management within Cisco’s DNA Center, ISE is the centerpiece for policy enforcement within SD-Access. So, when customers choose ISE for network visibility and segmentation, and to contain threats, they are also choosing to add future value and simplify their secure network operations. And this is why ISE is so well positioned to continue dominating the market well into the future.

For more information

The ISE age is far from over! We are looking ahead and aim to be a trusted partner for years to come, offering an integral solution from one of the world’s top security companies. More exciting announcements for ISE and Cisco Security are coming in the months ahead. Visit our Cisco ISE page for more information. We would love to give you a demo of this award-winning solution.

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