Expanding Security Everywhere and Creating New Opportunities for Partners

As you remember, we launched Security Everywhere last June during Cisco Live, San Diego.  Since that time we have received tremendous response from our mutual customers and you, our partners.

To further decrease the risk of security threats, on November 3rd, we announced additional investments and enhancements to our Security Everywhere portfolio and strategy.

We have expanded our security solutions to reach further into the cloud, network and endpoints. In addition, we launched a new threat awareness service for businesses of all sizes. The new solutions provide value to our mutual customers as well as, provide you with additional revenue opportunities that will increase your profitability.

Here are a few of the solutions I’d like to highlight.

Cisco Cloud Access Security (CAS) provides visibility and data security for cloud-based applications. The exciting news for you is that with CAS you can assist your customers address the sprawl of Shadow IT.  It is reported that 90 percent of organizations are not “fully aware” of devices accessing their network.  There are 5-10 times MORE cloud services being used in enterprises than are known by IT.

New additions to CAS offering allow organizations to address this complexity as well as increase visibility and control over data in cloud applications. Four new applications – Audit, Detect, Protect and Investigate – are designed to assess and act on non-sanctioned cloud applications, aimed at preventing cloud data loss.

Partnering with Elastica, CAS delivers increased visibility into “hidden” applications, those that employees might bring onto the network; detection of malicious behavior; and the ability to set security policies that tailor application usage and user behavior to align with corporate policies. To protect cloud-based applications, such as Dropbox and Salesforce.com, CAS prevents the uploading of sensitive information and inappropriate sharing of data in the applications, to limit data exposure breaches.

New Identity Services Engine (ISE) enhancements extend visibility and control for network and endpoints with new hyper-location access controls. Cisco ISE 2.0 extends security further into the network with new capabilities that help you see and control what’s on your network like never before and accelerate threat mitigation. Now you can deploy ISE services such as Profiling, Posture, Guest, and BYOD with 802.1x Network Access Devices (NADs) manufactured by Cisco Ecosystem partners.

You also have a simplified AAA device management and administration capabilities with the new work center for TACACS+ protocol support. Lastly, ISE 2.0 enhances the user experience for ISE administrators by leveraging workflow-focused work centers for centralized management and administration.

Our new Threat Awareness Service provides small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with threat visibility for their networks.   This portal-based, threat intelligence, data service enhances threat visibility by making broad, foundational security information accessible 24-hours a day.

As you can see we are continuing our commitment to providing the most comprehensive security portfolio in the industry.  This provides you with the opportunity to have a strategic Security conversation with your customers and reinforce your role as a trusted advisor.

Through this unique and differentiated approach you can lead with a discussion around business impact of security solutions and address the entire attack continuum. Our annual profitability study shows that partners who lead with security and focus on business outcomes for the customer have increased growth and highest profitability.

We want you to continue to grow a profitable security practice and have created a robust set of training programs, tools and assets designed to enable your sales, engineering and marketing teams. You can find this content, along with product sheets, training schedules, demos and more on our Extending Security Everywhere partner launch page.

Finally, I’d like to hear your feedback on topics of interest that have value to your customers and bring value to your business.