Customers Seek Threat Protection Across WAN, Access and Data Center

Many of you are familiar with the WannaCry ransomware attack that struck businesses in over 150 countries worldwide in May 2017.  Targets of the attack included huge corporations and organizations in the UK and U.S. in sectors as diverse as healthcare, telecommunications, logistics, manufacturing and even government.

Now, with WannaCry barely in the rearview mirror, more recent headlines show a new generation of threats proliferating on a global scale at even faster rates. The latest ransomware attack is identified as Nyetya and while it exploits some of the same vulnerabilities as WannaCry, it has distinct differences. Cisco’s Talos, one of the industry’s leading threat intelligence teams, is actively investigating Nyetya and their updates are published regularly on their blog.

With this dynamically growing threat, Cisco is working vigorously to integrate security into every level of infrastructure. We are achieving this through breakthrough innovations, with industry-first features like Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), and by introducing better ways for our customers to purchase security together with infrastructure. The Enterprise Agreement, as discussed in Dan Lohmeyer’s blog, is a strategic vehicle to drive adoption and simplify deployment of this cross-architecture offering for our customers. Additionally, the Cisco ONE Advanced Security offer simplifies purchasing by enabling customers to take advantage of Cisco security innovation across their data center, wide area network (WAN) and access infrastructure through a single agreement.

When we launched Cisco ONE Advanced Security about six months ago, I shared the details of these offers on my blog. We have been growing our customer base with these offers since launch, and seeing more adoption in small- and medium-sized business, with 71% of the business coming from commercial customers. The top three industry verticals that are benefitting from these offers are healthcare, financial and education.

We shared these offers recently with around 200 customers and partners at Cisco Live to get their perspective on which use cases might be most relevant to them, and the responses were very interesting.

These poll results show an almost equal demand from customers across each part of the infrastructure, indicating recognition of the need to secure their data centers, branch environments and access infrastructure.

These insights are very valuable as we continue to improve the suites in this offer, making more innovation accessible to our customers. Stay tuned for more to come…

Pooja