Elevate Your Security Profile

If you are a regional telco, cable company, data center, or mobility and wireless provider in the US, read on.

On March 27th and 29th Cisco launched our Cisco Service Provider Security Webinar. Watch here.

Why should you care?

This is a webinar specifically targeted to the security needs and best practices for smaller, regional service providers. Security is about protecting assets, employees, and reputations. Here is the kind of content we will be discussing.

Effective asset protection requires next-generation firewalls as well as other perimeter and data center security solutions, endpoint solutions, and management solutions that allow administrators to view and act on threat data. Solid security solutions protect both hardware and software assets by preventing access by unauthorized actors.

At the same time, we want to allow authorized access to these assets. Cyber assets can be rendered unavailable by distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS). Those attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and as the Internet of Things (IoT) evolves, IoT attacks are growing and maturing. The newly released Cisco Annual Cybersecurity Report dedicates an entire section to IoT and DDoS attacks.

Protecting the employees of a corporation is another function of security in general and cybersecurity in particular. If asset security is about protecting equipment and maintaining availability and uptime, employee security is about maintaining a safe working cyber-environment. Malware and phishing are two major contributors to security breaches.

Having a deep, global database of known threats and being able to automatically and quickly protect against these growing threats is incredibly important. Threats may originate anywhere, and can target individual employees, companies, or systems. Industry leading machine learning and behavior modeling are being applied by SPs (and their CSOs) to detect threats and respond more quickly.

Finally, protecting the reputation of a company, whether a global corporation or a regional telco or cloud provider, has perhaps the most potential impact, both from a legal standpoint and from a revenue standpoint. Data breaches can undermine customer confidence, hurt employee productivity, and tarnish a brand. And, recovering from a breach can be costly, slow, and painful.

The solution includes the combination of the entire security suite, asset and employee protection, acting in concert, as an architecture. But in order to succeed, an architectural approach still requires constant learning and retooling, adjusting on the fly to known and unknown threats, and maturing as the threats themselves mature.

Why is this relevant to SPs?

Now, as a former network engineer at a global networking service provider, I know that security is not the most top of mind topic for networkers. But if you are still reading then you know that it is hard to ignore the negative effects of a breach at a corporate level. Regardless if you are a regional telco, cloud provider, cable company or even the local bank or high school, cybersecurity impacts us all.

As I mentioned above, just last month Cisco launched the 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report. It offers security industry data, analysis and insights about attacker behavior over the past year. Why is this relevant to rural service providers? Because Cisco has a global view of security and networking and is uniquely positioned to provide insight and relatable best practices to SPs not only globally, but also locally.

More Cisco security knowledge opportunities

Cisco is a sponsor of the NTCA IP Vision Conference and Expo in New Orleans, April 23-25, where I, along with our team of cybersecurity and networking experts, will host a pre-conference workshop on security (along with other topics). Let’s continue the security conversation there.

One last thing

Okay, I was not going to make any specific product plugs but this one is pretty cool. The Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints’ feature of providing a review-able “DVR-like” timeline of the life cycle of an attack attempt has a geek factor that resonates with me. Check out the five-minute video.