Cisco has officially announced the launched of multiple innovations, each one geared towards helping enterprises bring their security posture more line in with the strenuous needs of today’s AI-dominated reality.
According to certain reports, the company took this opportunity to introduce solutions for its Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) platforms. Although these solutions are pursuing larger goal of better security, they are more specifically focused on simplifying policy management, enhancing visibility, and enabling enterprises to scale securely.
Cisco also delivered new Splunk integrations that, on their part, should unify data across platforms and empower security teams to automate tasks and respond faster against threats.
In case you weren’t aware, Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal ZTNA work together to deliver a robust zero-trust security framework which is known for seamlessly integrating into the network. Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall also emerges as capable of offering a distributed security fabric, which packs together Cisco and third-party firewalls, Cisco Hypershield, and Cisco Secure Workload.
When leveraged in conjunction, these solutions should secure user-to-application connections and back-end interactions; simplify management through Cisco’s Security Cloud Control, and enhance observability with AI-driven insights, helping organizations scale securely; and protect their digital assets in a complex threat landscape.
“The AI era demands a transformative approach to security. Organizations need distributed, identity-based, zero trust protection for applications, users, AI models and agents, supported by a unified policy framework,” said John Grady, Principal Analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group. “Cisco is in a very unique position to support this with its ability to embed advanced protections directly into the network through innovations like Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Universal Zero Trust Network Access.”
Having referred to them collectively, we now must refer to how each of these platforms can individually benefit from Cisco’s new updates.
Begin from Cisco’s Hybrid Mesh Firewall, it is set to avail fresh hardware, as well as new enforcement points and policy management capabilities in Security Cloud Control.
This it will do across, for starters, its Cisco Secure Firewall 6100 Series, where the innovation will address complexity, cost, and scalability challenges in AI-ready data centers with the highest performance density for data center firewalling i.e. 200 Gbps per rack unit, and modular scalability.
Next up, we have Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series, which should be able to deliver advanced on-box threat inspection and integrated software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) for distributed branches, at up to 3x price-performance compared to competition.
Turning our attention towards expanded enforcement points, Cisco Security Cloud Control will basically extend, moving forward, its unified policy management to next generation firewall (NGFW) on Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN (including on the new Cisco 8000 Secure Router Series), Cisco Hypershield-ready C9000 Smart Switches, and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) data center fabrics.
As for the multi-vendor segmentation policy, it will be supported on the back of Mesh Policy Engine, which allows for teams to define a single intent-based policy enforced across Cisco and third-party firewalls. The idea here is not just to simplify day-to-day operations but also to help organizations change enforcement points without re-writing policy.
On the other hand, Cisco’s Universal ZTNA will now have a chance at simplifying Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). To put it in simpler words, all Cisco SD-WAN offerings, including Meraki, now integrate with Cisco Secure Access, enabling customers to choose the optimal branch connectivity, while simultaneously enjoying a unified security service edge (SSE) policy and consistent enforcement.
Joining that would be the prospect of frictionless phishing resistance. Thanks to the availability of Duo Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cisco’s Duo can now play the role of an identity broker. Complementing that would be a new complete passwordless option and unique proximity verification capability, which allows Duo to conceive end-to-end phishing resistance on top of existing identity infrastructure.
As for the Splunk integrations, they are meant to surface insights from Cisco Secure Firewall integrated with Splunk; expand Threat Detection, Investigation and Response (TDIR) coverage using enhanced detection integration with Cisco Secure Firewall Threat defense; as well as streamline TDIR with Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) integrations for Cisco Secure Firewall.
