Cisco Drives Service Provider Cloud and NFV Growth with EANTC Validated Security Solutions

Massive digital transformation is creating significant new opportunities for service providers. The number of Internet connected devices will grow from 15 billion today to 500 billion by 2030. The rise of cloud computing is a game-changer in service provider architecture and service delivery resulting in greater efficiency, capacity and reduced costs.

Unfortunately, this means that as modern networks evolve, the attack surface that service providers must protect is expanding. Financially motivated attackers recognize the opportunity and devise sophisticated methods to infiltrate networks to steal newly digitized assets.

The new threats make security foundational to seizing emerging business opportunities created by the digital economy. Service providers must move swiftly to protect their business, customers, services, and infrastructure with comprehensive cybersecurity technology to ensure they can capitalize on digital growth opportunities.

Light Reading commissioned independent test lab European Advanced Networking Test Center AG (EANTC) to evaluate Cisco’s threat centric security solutions. The result from EANTC is the industry’s first, third party validation of physical and virtual security solutions for securing SP cloud and NFV environments. The products tested include Firepower 9300, ASAv, NGIPSv, WSAv, ESAv, and Radware DefensePro.

Security is an essential business enabler for service providers. Cisco’s threat-centric security solutions validated by EANTC help service providers to move confidently and adopt end-to-end security solutions to drive forward with NFV and cloud initiatives and more safely participate in the digital age.

EANTC validated that Cisco’s threat centric approach to security. The comprehensive battery of tests demonstrated industry-leading performance and security effectiveness for service providers.

Light Reading published EANTC’s report in a detailed article, Validating Cisco Threat Centric Security Solutions earlier this week.

Light Reading stated that, “The EANTC team found Cisco’s suite of capabilities more than capable of meeting the needs of today’s progressive enterprises and service providers, whether in a virtualized environment or when a hardware-based solution is needed to deliver certain levels of performance and scale.”

Here are highlights of the five tests.

Service Providers get Effective Security

The first test set aimed at security efficacy, to demonstrate how service providers can ensure their networks and their customers can stay safe by detecting and blocking the most advanced threats before they can damage the business. By deploying Cisco’s Firepower NGIPS and Radware DDoS across the test network including customer premise, SP network edge, SP data center, and cloud. EANTC validated a dramatic reduction in time to detection (TTD) of unknown threats from the current industry estimates of 100 to 200 days to mere minutes.

Streamlined Security for Business Agility

The second test showed how SPs can simplify new security service deployment and increase business agility. Two virtual security service chains were dynamically orchestrated, the first was used to measure time to verify and mitigate a business-crippling DDoS attack.  The second service chain validated Firepower Threat Defense (NGFW) ability to stop attacks as they happened with ASA firewall, NGIPS, and advanced malware protection (AMP).

Lower Cost and Complexity with Simplified Orchestration

The third test validated how security can be dynamically orchestrated across both SDN and NFV in minutes. The virtual Cisco ASA firewall and NGIPS were dynamically allocated via application centric infrastructure (ACI) application policy infrastructure controller (APIC). This integration with the Cisco virtual security technologies enables rapid orchestration to quickly spin up and down security virtual network functions (VNFs).

Consistent Security for Multi-Tenant NFV Environments

The fourth test focused on a key service provider business imperative: to isolate and protect each individual customer’s workflow without disrupting other customers’ service (if a single customer needs to be taken offline or if new customers are brought online). The test showed that the data center security services could be protected, scaled, and managed in an end-to-end multi-tenant NFV environment without any impact to performance or service.

Superior Performance and Greater Business Continuity

The final test simulated a large-scale cloud data center environment to verify carrier class performance, scalability, and resiliency while running a catalog of security services. The Cisco security capabilities satisfy requirements for the most demanding SP cloud and NFV environments.

For the full report, visit the article on LightReading, Validating Cisco Threat Centric Security Solutions.