Cisco Closes Sourcefire Acquisition; Delivers Threat-Centric Security Model

I am excited to announce that Cisco has completed the acquisition of Sourcefire. With this acquisition, we take a significant and exciting step in our journey to define the future of security. As one company, we offer an unbeatable combination that will greatly accelerate our mission of delivering a new, threat-centric security model. Through the addition of Sourcefire’s competitive talent and technologies, I see vast opportunities to expand Cisco’s global security footprint in both new and emerging markets, broaden our solution sets and deepen our customer relationships.

Security is now a boardroom discussion. Breaches mean lost IP, compromised customer information, lack of confidence and valuation impact. In tomorrow’s world of the Internet of Everything, the number and type of attack vectors will continue to increase, creating a daunting challenge for companies and those responsible to defend the infrastructure.

The single network perimeter has been replaced by a constantly morphing set of users, locations, access methods and devices creating the dual challenge of defending a dynamic perimeter and creating a near infinite number of points of vulnerability.

To address these customer concerns, Cisco will provide a deep and broad portfolio of integrated solutions that deliver unmatched visibility and continuous advanced threat protection across the entire attack continuum, allowing customers to act smarter and more quickly – before, during, and after an attack.

We are committed to excellence in innovation through our integration of Sourcefire. As we begin this journey, we want our customers to be aware of a few initial plans:

Cisco plans to drive both the ASA and FirePOWER platforms forward and leverage current hardware for future solutions. Over the last 12 months, Cisco, including the Sourcefire and Cognitive Security acquisitions, has increased investment in security innovation to provide market-leading threat-focused capabilities.

Cisco’s customers now have immediate access to Sourcefire’s industry-leading NGIPS, NGFW and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) solutions from their preferred network provider.

Cisco is committed to open source innovation and will continue to support Snort, ClamAV and other open source projects.

From a strategic standpoint, we will focus on a “threat-centric” security model moving forward – meaning that we will put a heavier focus on the threats themselves versus policy or controls. Given the fast-changing threat landscape, an organization’s approach to reducing the time from breach to recovery needs to be integrated, pervasive and continuous, as well as open. Through our threat-centric model, we will provide broad coverage across all potential attack vectors, rapidly adjust to and learn from new attack methods, and implement that intelligence back into the infrastructure after each attack.

Sourcefire’s talent and technologies enable us to accelerate the delivery of this threat-centric model to our customers. As we begin to fully integrate Sourcefire and evolve our product roadmap, we will keep our customers apprised of the latest developments and offers.

We are eager to tell you more. Stay tuned.