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Cisco Expands Security Services Into the Cloud
April 2009 by Marc Jacob
Cisco announced new additions to its portfolio that
bolster the network security infrastructure and the delivery of cloud security services, thereby enabling
businesses to collaborate with greater confidence even as their workforce and partners become
increasingly mobile and interactive. Today’s announcement, being made at the RSA Conference in San
Francisco, comes at a time when collaboration and mobility technologies are redefining how, when and
where business gets done. As companies continue to extend connectivity outside their office walls,
businesses must focus on new ways to protect its data and communications.
While today’s business applications, social media, software-as-a-service and wireless technologies gain
widespread adoption and lead to new interactive business models, those same technologies and business
models are jeopardized by threats that are just as novel and agile. Current network security developments
and security trends will be highlighted tomorrow at the 2009 RSA Conference, where Cisco Chairman
and CEO John Chambers will deliver a keynote address titled “Collaborate with Confidence.” Chambers
will describe security trends and discuss his perspective on the heightened importance of network security
in a collaborative world.
The Cisco security offerings announced today incorporate new threat defense products and services that
will help customers protect against attacks, malware and botnets, no matter where they connect and
communicate.
New Product Offerings:
• Cisco Security Cloud Services: This unique approach for delivering security as a service ties
together services from multiple networks and applications, bringing together the cloud and the
enterprise network for highly secure collaborative communications. The Cisco Security Cloud
supports the recently announced Cisco IronPort® Hosted Email Security Services as well as
Global Correlation, a powerful new technique that powers security services integrated into Cisco’s
broad range of security offerings.
• Cisco IPS Sensor Software Version 7.0: Global Correlation for intrusion prevention system
(IPS) harnesses the power of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations, a powerful threat-defense
ecosystem, to achieve unprecedented threat-protection efficacy. Cisco turns global threat data
captured from a massive footprint of security devices into dynamic updates and actionable
intelligence, such as “reputation” scores, and pushes that intelligence out to a business’s network
security infrastructure for protective action. By incorporating Global Correlation, Cisco IPS 7.0 is
up to two times as effective in stopping malicious attacks, in a shorter amount of time, than
traditional signature-only IPS technologies.
• Cisco ASA 5500 Series 8.2 Software: This offering in the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances
family is designed to enhance end-to-end security for offices of all sizes, improving threat
mitigation and enabling companies to more securely connect, communicate and conduct business.
With a new Botnet Traffic Filter for identifying infected clients, IPS availability for small offices,
and increased clientless remote-access capabilities, Cisco now offers support for the widest range
of platforms, operating systems and endpoints in the industry.
o Cisco ASA Botnet Traffic Filter: The new Botnet Traffic Filter enables Cisco ASA 5500
Series appliances to more accurately identify infected clients using information from Cisco
Security Intelligence Operations: — more than 1,000 threat-collection servers that receive
information from more than 700,000 sensors and 500 third-party feeds. With improved
threat intelligence, customers can more accurately identify infected clients and streamline
their operations so that security administrators can focus on the most challenging threats.
o Cisco Remote Access and VPN Enhancements: Cisco ASA Software Release 8.2 expands
remote access capabilities with next-generation tunneling and session persistence through
Cisco AnyConnect Essentials for corporate and mobile users, thus covering the widest
range of platforms, operating systems, and endpoints in the industry. Support for the Cisco
Virtual Office solution has also been added to the Cisco ASR 1000, allowing this widearea
network aggregation platform to also act as the head-end device for Cisco Virtual
Office deployments capable of supporting several thousand remote clients. The Cisco ASR
1000 also now supports GET VPN, allowing instant provisioning of security services and
delivering high-performance, highly secure any-to-any connectivity for up to 10,000
Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) tunnels at up to 7 gigabits per second of throughput,
enabling customers to prioritize and deliver data flows efficiently to multiple network
addresses.
• Cisco SAFE: A security reference architecture that provides prescriptive validated design guides
to help organizations plan, design and deploy security solutions across the network, such as
campus offices, the Internet edge, branches and data centers. These blueprints provide defense-indepth
guidance and best practices for securing data and transactions as they traverse the network.
• Cisco Information Technology Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (IT GRC)
Security Assessment Services: These services help organizations establish a single program for
reducing information security risk and the cost of compliance, by aligning business and
technology strategies. Businesses are better able to balance the need for collaboration and
information sharing with privacy and information control and to manage disparate security and
compliance programs that often lead to inefficiency, duplicated effort, coverage gaps and higher
costs. With the Cisco IT GRC Security Assessment Services, organizations can establish a
common control framework: a single, unified set of security controls that efficiently meet
compliance obligations and protect organizations from threats. The services provide a
comprehensive assessment of a business’s security policies and security architecture and map
them against the requirements of the common control framework to identify gaps and make
prioritized recommendations for resolving those gaps.
– Availability:
All products are available now.
