Vectoring to a New Mission

A couple of weeks ago, I announced a new name and a new mission for the group I lead at Cisco. I’ll do my best to minimize reader exposure to boring administrative details, but the long and the short of it is that the former Cisco Global Government Solutions Group (GGSG) has become the Cisco Threat Response, Intelligence, and Development (TRIAD) organization.

Any organizational name change is only a label placed on more fundamental transformations in missions, strategies, and desired outcomes. While the new organization will continue to serve government customers, the time has come to mobilize the expertise we have built up over the years to help critical infrastructure and enterprise customers strengthen their abilities to deliver IT-based services and value with minimal disturbance from unauthorized sources.

Vectoring the organization’s mission to threat is the key to understanding what TRIAD is all about. Through our work with Cisco customers, observation and analysis of phenomena visible in Cisco and customer networks, and application of innovative thinking about security practices and processes, we see enormous potential for developing and delivering threat-focused approaches to cyber security into products, services, and solutions.

Our strategy to execute this mission calls for:

Building on established and unique Cisco competencies in the areas of network monitoring, data analysis, and prescriptive remediation to quickly identify and track cyber security threats on a global scale.

Sharing this intelligence with customers, partners, and industry peers.

Enabling our customers and partners to take timely and effective actions to counter threats to their ability to deliver IT-based services and value.

Collaborating with Cisco product, services, and solutions groups to strengthen security features, functions, and attributes of Cisco offerings.

There’s a lot here that excites me. First comes the aspect of mobilizing the power of the network—until now a sleeping giant when it comes to security—to identify and defeat cyber security threats. Second comes the idea of moving the world to collective defense against cyber security threats in contrast to today’s every-enterprise-for-itself approach. Third is the knowledge that Cisco is the only company in the world with the reach, relationships, and knowledge to lead this global transformation in cyber security.

Now there’s still a lot of work to be done to make the abilities we pioneered with our public sector customers scalable, reproducible, deployable, and actionable in the commercial market. Still, every time I have discussed and demonstrated our abilities to customers and partners, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

What then is our desired outcome for TRIAD? While we certainly view TRIAD as a vehicle for greater growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction for Cisco, the ultimate desired outcome for every group at Cisco is to change the world. In our case, we’re in it to shift the balance toward the good guys in security. This may be a wildly ambitious goal, but if it’s the right thing to do, and this is, then let’s go do the right thing.