A good security platform should foster collaboration and accelerate threat response  

Over the past couple of months, with all the upheaval we have witnessed, one topic has remained top of mind for most of us: the need to connect people in new ways to foster communication and teamwork as we grapple with our new, evolving reality. In that spirit, we proudly launched our new security platform, Cisco SecureX, at two recent digital events, Cisco Live 2020 and the Cisco Secure Insights Summit.

Listening to our roster of impressive speakers during these two events – including, for example, soccer star Megan Rapinoe and accomplished sled dog racer Dallas Seavey – I couldn’t help but think about the many conversations we’ve had with our customers about the importance of teamwork and collaboration. In the world of sports, in the arena of cybersecurity, and everywhere in between, working together for the greater good is more crucial now than ever.

Running in the same direction

Cisco SecureX is designed to empower teams – to increase collaboration, visibility, and automation in order to streamline operations and simplify security. It’s a culmination of many years of listening to our customers and partners and trying to find ways to make their jobs less complex. A critical component of that goal is integration – not just of our technology, but also allowing organizations to closely align their SecOps, NetOps, and ITOps teams so they can more cohesively protect assets and enable business.

We were fortunate enough to be joined by several of our customers during our two digital events, who shared with us their top security challenges, goals, and successes. According to Collin John, global security manager at professional services firm, Alvarez and Marsal, “When all teams can work together to solve a problem, I think it puts you on top. Your most vulnerable areas are usually when you have silos, because the information is not flowing.”

He makes a good point. Imagine if a pack of sled dogs decided to go rogue and all run in different directions while trying to pull the same sled. It would be inefficient and dangerous. The same goes for security. At the end of the day, we’re all working towards a shared goal – to make our organizations’ infrastructure more scalable, resilient, and secure. We all need to be running in the same direction. In a recent survey by ESG, 97% of respondents said it is either critical or important for security products to integrate with other technologies.

The idea of operating from a shared framework was also echoed by Mick Jenkins, CISO at Brunel University London, during Cisco Live. “The biggest difficulty for us,” he said, “is being able to have a common operational picture, if you like, between the ITOps teams and SecOps teams and the NetOps teams.” By providing out-of-the-box integration between both Cisco and many third-party technologies – across security, IT, and networking applications – Cisco SecureX makes it simpler for various operational teams within an organization to get on the same page and work together.

In fact, 91% of our customers find that our security platform helps their teams collaborate more.

Making technology a member of the team

Another theme that we hear about often from our customers is automation. Especially with such a dramatic skills shortage in cybersecurity, organizations are trying to do more with fewer resources.

According to ESG, “Cybersecurity technology platforms have the potential to simplify and automate security operations, giving time back to overwhelmed security teams.” Not only do we want to help your teams work more quickly and collaboratively, but through an efficient platform approach, we are making the technology itself a member of the team. By automating tasks such as security analytics, threat detection, policy management, and remediation, and then applying orchestration capabilities, Cisco SecureX can free up your team members to focus on more strategic, high-value initiatives.

So why are we doing all of this? Why are we working to empower teams, expand visibility, and enable automation? Ultimately, we’re trying to put you ahead of the attackers and help you find and mitigate security issues much faster. And it’s always gratifying to hear directly from our customers when our multi-year strategy is paying dividends for them. It tells us we’re moving in the right direction – as a team!

Michael Degroote, infrastructure consultant at manufacturing company, Mohawk Industries, who joined one of our Cisco Live keynotes said, “Working with Cisco, we’ve been seeing a lot of faster remediations of our incidents and detected threats….I think that the platform approach like SecureX is the future of security here at Mohawk Industries. It will make things easier, faster, and we will see much more going on in our environment than ever before.”

An eye towards the future

While we’ve certainly come a long way over the past several years in terms of making our security technologies simpler to implement, maintain, and use, we’re not done yet. Cisco already has an open ecosystem of 170+ partners, enabling customers to get the most out of their technologies by using them together. But we’re not stopping there.

Our close relationships with our customers and partners have made it possible for us to conceptualize and launch SecureX, and that open dialogue will remain critical as we forge ahead. We will continue to listen closely to our customers and partners, expand our third-party integrations, and build on our own security innovations. We want SecureX to deliver tremendous value well into the future – as the attack surface evolves and as IT demands proliferate.

“At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility to the company and to our customers [that], if there’s an incident, [I am] determining what level that is and reacting and communicating as fast as possible,” said Lou Saviano, vice president of Global IT Services at e-learning company, Skillsoft. “And I believe, especially with SecureX and the integration of your products, I’m going to be better positioned to do that.”

Lou has basically summarized our vision – for technology to become more of a help than a hindrance, and make things better for security leaders and their teams. And as new attacks arise and more security technology is developed, the plan is to seamlessly incorporate additional capabilities into SecureX.

We know that some days it feels like you’re scoring goals, and other days it feels more like your huskies are all running in different directions. We want to make it easier for you to achieve greater visibility, control, and teamwork – play by play, day after day, and year after year.

Next steps

To experience our digital events and learn more about our integrated security platform:

• Discover Cisco SecureX.
• View the replay of the Cisco Secure Insights Summit, featuring discussions with Megan Rapinoe, ESG’s Jon Oltsik, and more.
• Watch on-demand sessions from Cisco Live 2020.

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