Cisco Expands Security Services Into the Cloud to Help Businesses Collaborate With Confidence

Innovative Security Offerings Strengthen Defense Against Threats as Collaboration and Mobility Redefine Network's Role in Protecting Access


SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - April 21, 2009) - Cisco® (NASDAQ: CSCO) today 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. To attend a live webcast of Chambers' keynote address, please visit: http://www.cisco.com/offer/rsakeynote.

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.

    • 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.

    • 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 wide-area 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-in-depth 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.

Supporting Quotes:

  • Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager, Security Technology business unit, Cisco - "In today's changing world, businesses require a security strategy that accounts for the physical, virtual, mobile and global aspects of their business. Our vision for security is based on a balance of protection and enablement, which integrates security from the network through to the endpoint and the user. Security needs to capture the latest threat intelligence to mitigate shifting threats. This combination enables businesses to collaborate with greater confidence when engaging employees, partners and customers."

  • James Small, security practice manager, Analysts International Corp. - "Our customers are working in a world today where collaborating across the Internet is the norm. While this open collaboration is driving innovation and business, it is also exploited by ever-expanding crime syndicates with their own increasing revenue targets. Working within the IT framework of driving productivity while trying to contain the risks of collaborative networking, security professionals are looking for better tools. Cisco's announcement today answers this call with security solutions that not only enable collaboration but scale to unprecedented new levels of threat detection and mitigation by using these same collaborative technologies to build what is essentially the world's largest and smartest honeynet. We are very excited to see Global Correlation being built into Cisco's IPS solution. This integrates Cisco's elaborate threat intelligence into an enforceable policy-based system with real-time telemetry collaboration and response."

  • Dustin Cornelius, computer systems analyst, Southern Co. - "Protection and compliance are the main objectives for our department. And in today's networked world, threats are rapidly growing in number and sophistication, and compliance is an ever-growing challenge. With Cisco, we have an integrated security solution that provides strong security architecture at lower operational costs but can also help meet compliance mandates. With the new offerings announced today, we are glad to see Cisco adapt its security solutions to address the evolving threats and help protect our business."

Pricing and Availability:

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Supporting Resources:

  • Press Release: Cisco Strengthens Commitment to Business Collaboration by Extending Enhanced Software-as-a-Service Applications to the Enterprise Network

  • Cisco Security Center

  • Visit the Cisco blog, The Platform

  • Cisco Security Intelligence Operations - Underlying all Cisco products and services is Cisco Security Intelligence Operations, which aggregates information from tightly integrated data derived from multiple Cisco devices and services to continuously assess and correlate threats and vulnerabilities. Sources for Cisco Security Intelligence Operations data include Cisco's worldwide Threat Operations Centers, Cisco Security Remote Management Services, the SensorBase Network, Cisco Security IntelliShield Alert Manager, Cisco Intrusion Prevention Systems and a variety of other Cisco functions, including Cisco Security Research and Operations, Cisco Security Incident Response, the Corporate Security Programs Office, and Global Policy and Government Affairs.

Technorati Tags: Cisco, collaboration, network security, IronPort, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, spam, virus, malware, software-as-a-service, SaaS, security as a service, enterprise security, security appliance.

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