EDITOR’S QUESTION
Anthony Perridge
Security Sales Director, Cisco
Cisco’s 2015 report reveals that the threat
landscape has never been greater or more
sophisticated; which we believe will continue
to be relevant in 2015.
Every enterprise is vulnerable whatever its size,
business focus or location and in order to gain
the information security advantage, IT security
professionals must be able to have a bird’s
eye view of thei r environment, understand
whether it’s a risk and then protect it. These
include identification of the technologies
that provide visibility into everything on the
network, leveraging the technologies that
help apply security intelligence to data,
identifying agile technologies that allow
the company to adapt quickly and take
action to protect systems in rapidly changing
mobile environments, and locking down the
organization’s network or computers with
capabilities like application control especially
for employee owned devices.
All organizations should be concerned about
finding the right balance of trust, transparency,
and privacy because much is at stake. CIO’s
need an effective strategy that uses new
technologies, simplifies their architecture and
operations, and strengthens their security
teams. A threat-centric security model enables
defenders to address the full attack continuum,
across all attack vectors, and to respond at any
time, all the time, in a continuous fashion –
before, during, and after an attack.
Protecting users against cyber-attacks
involves keeping machines and Web browsers
fully patched to minimize the number of
vulnerabilities that an attacker can exploit.
Ensuring Web traffic is filtered and checked for
malware prior to delivery to Web browser is
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also essential. At the end of the day, security is
ultimately a question of three phases:
1. Before – establishing control over how the
network is used and what data can be
access accessed
2 During - Visibility and intelligence is vital if
security professionals can hope to identify
the threats and risky devices and monitor
their activities on the corporate network
3. After – when the inevitable happens and
the network is compromised by a threat,
this is the ability to retrospectively review
how that threat entered the network; which
systems it interacted with and what files
and applications were run to ensure it can
be cleaned up as quickly as possible.
At Cisco we are continuously developing new
tools and solutions to address the companies’
risks and take necessary actions to keep
companies from the ever-increasing attacks.
Cisco’s industry leading Email and Web
Security solutions, customers benefit from
unmatched visibility and control combined
with the most cost-effective, seamless
approach to addressing advanced malware
problems. Cisco has added its Advanced
Malware Protection (AMP), originally
developed by Sourcefire, into its Content
Security Portfolio of products, including Web
and Email Security Appliances and Cloud Web
Security Service. Cisco recently announced
that it is changing the way organizations
protect against sophisticated threats with the
introduction of the industry’s first threatfocused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW).
Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services provides
the full contextual awareness and dynamic
controls needed to automatically assess
threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize
defenses to protect all networks.
www.intelligentcio.com