All great teams have a shared language. Whether you’re the reigning World Cup Champions or an IT team on the frontlines of network defense, collaboration is the key to success. And effective collaboration hinges on communication.

For years, Cisco has operated on the cutting-edge of communication standards, working tirelessly to make multi-platform communication seamless and efficient.

This June, Cisco achieved a historic milestone when the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) declared our XMPP-Grid architecture an official Internet standard for security information exchange.

Cisco’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) – the underpinnings of Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid for short) 1.0 – ushered in a new era of seamless collaboration, allowing information to be shared between security platforms from multiple vendors. Prior to this innovation, IT teams faced a discouraging reality: Despite having a wealth of security information from dozens of multivendor platforms at their fingertips, it was nearly impossible for IT teams to configure these technologies to share identity and context information in real-time.

pxGrid enables IT teams to harness the full potential of their security technologies. An open, scalable, and highly-secure form of security information exchange, Cisco’s pxGrid technology facilitates integrations between its 60 Technical Alliance Partners today. These integrations eliminate the complexity of single-purpose APIs by allowing all integrated platforms to publish and subscribe to relevant security information. With this additional security context, actionable intelligence is available to perform automated incident response, for mitigating risks and containing threats more effectively. In short, pxGrid enhances the power of your security apparatus through effective communication.

And this is only the start: As Cisco’s nearly 40,000 Identity Services Engine customers migrate to pxGrid 2.0’s WebSocket based architecture, Cisco continues to lead the way in a growing ecosystem of open security information exchange.

Cisco’s implementation of the standard, pxGrid, is available on Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE).  If you are one of our Cisco ISE customers already collaborating effectively via Cisco pxGrid, thank you for supporting our community! And if you have technology partners who have not yet integrated their platforms with Cisco pxGrid, please request that they adopt this new standard.

If you are a Cisco ISE customer but have yet to benefit from security ecosystem integrations to address use cases such as intent based network segmentation and rapid threat containment, please learn about how Cisco pxGrid can be licensed and deployed.

Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan would probably be the first to say that the success of the US Women’s National Team depends on superior communication. As an IETF-approved internet standard, pxGrid helps elevate your information security practices. Through this open communication standard, your security technologies work together to form a solid defense, so your company is free to concentrate on business and score big where it matters.