Cisco’s Approach To Simplifying Security Technologies

Cisco says its comprehensive platform approach helps partners deliver a simpler security solution to customers.

Security was a hot topic at this week’s Cisco Partner Summit 2019 as partners look to secure their and their customers’ futures in a complex, multi-vendor environment.

“We’re integrating the portfolio together so that it simplifies the engagement model with our partners,” said Gee Rittenhouse, senior vice president and general manager of security at Cisco.

In other words, partners wouldn’t have to integrate individual point products to provide a full security solution.

Cisco is also combining analytics and automation on top of its security offerings to simplify the operational side as well, Rittenhouse said.

As a partner, Bob Rossi, vice president of networking, collaboration and security at CDW, said it can be an “everyday challenge” to provide a simple security solution to customers.

“A lot of our customers have gone with a best-of-breed type of approach and they have all these different point products from different partners, and they’re really struggling today to come up with a way to manage all of these alerts and budgets: ‘What do I pay attention to? What’s really important?’” said Rossi.

With Cisco’s latest technologies, Rossi said, he has seen a more simplified approach, “giving customers a much easier environment to manage.”

New services like Cisco Threat Response simplifies a security team’s breach defense experience with more visibility and actions for threat response, “taking intelligence from three different feeds, from email, from endpoint and firewall, [to help customers] understand what threats exist in our environment,” said Rossi.

Cisco is also leading the way the in the “Zero-Trust” security model.

What sets Cisco apart, said Rittenhouse, is having a “comprehensive view of Zero Trust.”

“Instead of just taking a singular product and then adding Zero Trust to it, we think about it as Zero Trust for the workforce, the workplace and the workload, all of which is necessary to have a true Zero Trust solution.”

Watch CRNtv to hear more from Rittenhouse and Rossi.