Cisco has announced new offerings to embed security throughout the extended network – from the data centre out to endpoints, branch offices, and the cloud – for pervasive threat visibility and control. By integrating security everywhere, enterprises and service 
providers gain the ability to deliver the threat-centric security requirements demanded by today’s dynamic threat landscape and capture emerging business opportunities created by the rise of the Digital Economy and the Internet of Everything (IoE).
The IoE market is expected to generate $19-trillion in value to organisations over the next decade, and represents a $1.7-trillion opportunity to service providers (Cisco Consulting Services, 2013). Additionally, according to the 2015 Cisco Visual Networking IndexTM (VNI) Forecast, the number of IP- connected personal devices and M2M connections online will grow from 14 billion in 2014 to more than 24 billion by 2019. However, cybercrime is simultaneously becoming increasingly sophisticated and industrialised such that the financial opportunity for cybercriminals also is rising and valued at an estimated $450-billion to $1-trillion (Cybersecurity: Assessing Our Vulnerabilities and Developing an Effective Response, Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, U.S. Senate, March 19, 2009).
Security Everywhere for Enterprises and Service Providers
To minimise the complexity of managing security across a distributed organisation and to increase threat visibility into the farthest reaches of the enterprise and global service provider infrastructures, Cisco is embedding security throughout the extended network. Cisco is adding more sensors to increase visibility; more control points to strengthen enforcement; and pervasive, advanced threat protection to reduce time-to-detection and time-to-response, limiting the impact of attacks. With security everywhere, Cisco provides scalable threat protection covering the broadest range of attack vectors and throughout the entire attack continuum – before, during and after an attack.
Expanding Security Solutions for Enterprise Organisations
Cisco is launching the following set of solutions across the entire networking portfolio:
- Endpoints: With Cisco AnyConnect® Featuring Cisco AMP for Endpoints, customers using the Cisco AnyConnect 4.1 VPN client now can easily deploy and significantly expand their threat protection to VPN-enabled endpoints to continuously and retrospectively guard against advanced malware.
- Campus and Branch: FirePOWER Services solutions for Cisco® Integrated Services Routers (ISR) provides centrally managed Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) at the branch office integrated in the network fabric, where dedicated security appliances may not be feasible.
- Network as a Sensor and Enforcer: Cisco has embedded multiple security technologies into the network infrastructure to provide broad threat visibility to rapidly identify users and devices associated with anomalies, threats and misuse of networks and applications. New capabilities include:
o Broader Integration between Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Lancope StealthWatch: Enterprises can go beyond just mapping IP addresses to identifying threat vectors based on ISE’s context of who, what, where, when and how users and devices are connected and access network resources. This provides greater contextual threat visibility with StealthWatch for accelerated identification of threats.
o NetFlow on Cisco UCS®: Extending Cisco’s network-as-a-sensor capabilities to the physical and virtual servers, customers now have greater visibility into network traffic flow patterns and threat intelligence information in the data centre.
Using the new embedded security capabilities, Cisco networks now have the ability to automate and dynamically enforce security policies. Customers can segment applications and users throughout the network – across the extended enterprise to use policy to define which users can get which applications and what traffic can traverse the network then automate security operations.
o TrustSec + ISE and StealthWatch Integration: Stealth Watch can now block suspicious network devices by initiating segmentation changes, providing rapid response to identified malicious activity. ISE can then modify access policies for Cisco routers, switches, and wireless LAN controllers embedded with TrustSec technology.
In addition to the solutions above, Cisco also is announcing:
- Hosted Identity Services provide a secure, 24/7, cloud-delivered service for the Cisco Identity Services Engine, a security policy management platform that unifies and automates secure network access control. The new hosted service speeds time to deployment, supporting business growth and providing role-based, context-aware identity enforcement of users and devices permitted on the network, streamlining enterprise mobility experiences.
- pxGrid Ecosystem: Eleven new partners have joined the pxGrid Ecosystem with the addition of several new ecosystem technology categories, including cloud security and network/application performance management. pxGrid is Cisco’s security context information exchange fabric that enables security platforms to share information to drive better threat detection, mitigation and overall security operations.
Securing Evolved Programmable Networks for Service Providers Cisco’s service provider security solutions represent a unique approach designed for service providers’ business requirements. It offers threat-centric security that protects workloads as they are provisioned — and elastically distributed — across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. To address service provider needs for an open, flexible and programmable infrastructure, Cisco is expanding advanced threat-centric protection for its Evolved Programmable Network (EPN). The Cisco EPN is the foundation for its open network architecture, designed to advance the adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and to accelerate time to revenue, while reducing the costs and complexities of deploying new services.
Cisco’s new service provider security solutions include the following:
- Cisco FirepowerTM 9300 Integrated Security Platform is a carrier-grade, high-performance, scalable and modular multi-services security platform purpose-built for service providers, that can scale security for increased data flows due to accelerated service demands and carrier class requirements.
- Expanded Advanced Orchestration and Cloud Capabilities enable Cisco’s new security solutions to easily integrate with the Cisco architecture and third-party SDN/NFV solutions, as well as Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance Virtual (ASAv) with Cisco’s Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) and Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI). These orchestration and cloud capabilities also include open APIs for integration with orchestration, Operation Support Systems/Business Support Systems, and Cloud Security-as-a-Service solutions.
- Advanced features such as secure containers to accommodate future security services and applications. Additionally, Cisco ASA firewall and third-party DDoS mitigation from Radware are currently supported, with additional capabilities planned for the second half of 2015.
