Cisco Simplifies Security and Tackles Complexity with New Cloud-Native Platform, SecureX

Cisco, the leader in enterprise security, today unveiled a radical simplification in the way customers experience Cisco Security’s portfolio and addresses complexity —one of the top pain points for CISOs. Building on a decade of significant investment in innovation, partnerships, acquisitions, customer research and open-source standards, Cisco is now offering customers the broadest, most integrated cloud-native security platform in the industry, Cisco SecureX. 

Cisco SecureX provides a comprehensive user experience across the breadth of Cisco’s integrated security portfolio and customers’ existing security infrastructure. Cisco SecureX unifies visibility, identifies unknown threats, and automates workflows to strengthen customers’ security across network, endpoint, cloud, and applications. Because simplicity is essential to securing today’s digital transformation, Cisco SecureX is included with every Cisco Security product. 

As businesses embrace digital transformation, expanding to the cloud, incorporating IoT and high-speed wireless access increases the corresponding attack surface. Securing this complex environment becomes difficult with various technologies that don’t interoperate. Cisco’s 2020 CISO Benchmark Study of 2800 security professionals surveyed found that twenty-eight percent feel that managing a multi-vendor environment is very challenging, an increase of eight points from last year’s survey.  

“As a CISO, it is a real security challenge to protect our students, staff, and the sensitive data that comes with them. Having a holistic security platform has helped us simplify and accelerate our security operations. All of our tools seamlessly integrated and Cisco’s platform approach gives us one view into our layered protection and valuable time back,” said Don Bryant, CISO, The University of North Carolina at Pembroke. 

“Nearly one-third (31 percent) of organizations base cybersecurity monitoring and protection on more than 50 different security products. This not only adds cost and complexity but also makes it harder to detect and respond to cybersecurity incidents in a timely fashion,” said Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst and Fellow at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Integrated cybersecurity technology platforms like Cisco SecureX have the potential to address these economic, technical, and resource challenges by providing more comprehensive threat detection, automated incident response, and ease-of-operations capabilities."

Foundational capabilities of Cisco SecureX include:

• Unifying visibility across all parts of the customers’ security portfolio, Cisco or third-party solutions.
• Providing customers and partners business value in under 15 minutes, through a fully cloud-native and multi-tenant solution.
• Analyzing events and data across the enterprise including more than 150 million endpoints, network traffic from switches and routers including encrypted traffic, Google, AWS and Azure and private data center environments.
• Identifying within minutes who and what has been targeted, enabling remediation using data enrichment across security products and threat intelligence feeds.
• Bringing the power of Cisco Talos threat analysts into the customer’s SOC to hunt for the latest threats.

"The industry has been flooded with thousands of point products that were meant to help customers but instead created unmanageable environments with products that don't work together. This has created gaps in businesses' security posture," said Gee Rittenhouse, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Security Business Group. “In addition to bad actors, complexity has become another risk that security teams have to overcome. Cisco SecureX is a fundamental shift in the customers security experience by removing the complexity and providing one unified view on the state of customers' security services and alerts. In doing so, security teams can become more efficient with resources and be a business enabler that propels the digital transformation forward."