Security and What Matters Most…

Summer is officially in full swing. My kids have finished with another school year. Our family vacation has been planned. When the family is away on vacation together, I worry a bit about the safety and security of our home, our personal information and of course our physical well-being when traveling. Still, even with ever more creative ways for cyber adversaries to disrupt our lives, for the most part, the systems in place have been successful at helping us avoid major catastrophe.

Our service provider customers are no different: They also worry about the safety and security of their networks and infrastructures and any impact an attack might have on their customers. Cisco’s latest VNI shows that service providers have even greater reasons to be concerned with the number of connected devices online expected to grow from 14 billion in 2014 to 24 billion in 2019.

Security has become a service provider imperative. Cyber adversaries are more aggressive than ever in attacking services, devices and customer data. At Cisco, we believe that a modular, open and multi-vendor orchestrated architectural approach to security is an ideal option for service providers. We also believe this approach will accelerate the service providers’ ability to create new revenue streams, lower costs and enhance agility while keeping pace with growth in demands of their services – all while preserving the security and integrity of their infrastructure.

As part of that open architectural approach, we recently announced, a critical security platform, which will expand Cisco’s Evolved Programmable Network (EPN). Cisco’s EPN is designed to accelerate the adoption of SDN (Software Defined Networks) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization by Service Provider customers by tying their compute, network, storage infrastructure on a unified fabric. The Firepower 9300 is specifically designed for service providers’ open, flexible, programmable business needs. It offers threat-centric security that protects workloads as they are provisioned — and elastically distributed — across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Additionally, service providers can extend these security capabilities as new offerings to their customers. One example of this is virtualized managed services, such as Cloud VPN, which Deutsche Telekom is deploying with Cisco in three countries.

Personally, it is relief to know that service providers have even more powerful means at their disposal to protect my information and activities over the Internet.

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