Active Threat Analytics: Easing the Burden of Threat Management

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a trickster king cursed with the eternal torment of fruitless labor. As punishment for his hubris and wile, Zeus condemned this hapless figure to the unending task of pushing a boulder up a mountain. Once he reached the top, the boulder would fall back down. And he would begin again. And again. Every day. Forever.

I suspect that it will not be a great imaginative leap for those of you in the in the information security industry to empathize with this unfortunate soul. Cyberattacks are continuously growing in frequency and sophistication. Threats are ever-present. New technologies and changing business models are always forcing you to change your tactics. Protecting your organization’s sensitive information seems like a Sisyphean undertaking: constant and unceasing.

I hear this from our customers all the time. IT security feels like an uphill battle, and the struggle to guard against ever-evolving threats seems interminable. As innovative social, mobile, analytics, cloud, robotics, and Internet of Everything (IoE) technologies transform every organization into a digital organization, the prospect of maintaining a strong security posture amid such rapid and widespread change can be daunting. We hear you, we get it, and we are ready to help. Just as Cisco is helping organizations become digital, we are also deeply committed to ensuring that security is the bedrock upon which the successful digital enterprises of the future will stand. For that to happen, organizations will need security solutions designed for the world of tomorrow. To help organizations transform securely, we have created Cisco Active Threat Analytics – a suite of next-generation managed security services that will help customers to detect threats in their environments with great speed, accuracy, and focus.

The three tiers of Active Threat Analytics service – Essential, Enhanced, and Premier – provide increasing degrees of speed, accuracy, and focus in threat detection and management. Each tier of Active Threat Analytics service combines deep expertise, leading intelligence, cutting-edge technology, and advanced analytics into a unified and efficient system for detecting sophisticated threats quickly. Expert investigators in our security operations centers monitor customer networks 24×7 to detect, investigate, and contain threats. We then work with the customer to help remediate the threat and to shore up any security gaps within their environment. By employing big data analytics in concert with full packet capture and other advanced technologies for forensic inspection, we can drastically reduce the mean time to respond to a threat and give you unmatched visibility both across your entire network and deep into specific threats. Rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all approach to security, Active Threat Analytics is highly customizable depending upon customer needs, and it can be combined with additional services for Incident Response and device management.

Most importantly, our investigation process yields highly accurate results. For customers used to sifting through tens of thousands of security events each year, we can narrow that load down to several hundred confirmed tickets requiring remediation. We have documented a 98.5 percent reduction in security events for a global banking customer over the past year – in other words, it’s like replacing Sisyphus’ Jeep-sized boulder with one the size of a beagle, his mountain with a molehill. We can do the same for you. Learn more about how Active Threat Analytics works, take a look at our case studies, and discover how Cisco can help you manage threats proactively.