Commitment and Community: Cisco’s Security DNA

Create community. Drive cross company collaboration. Raise the corporate security consciousness. Educate! These were the major themes present at the synergistic 5th annual Cisco SecCon held December 5-6, 2012, at Cisco’s corporate headquarters in San Jose, CA. The senior leadership team in the Security and Government Group had a clear and present message for the Cisco Engineering community: Security is the differentiator for Cisco! Building and developing our corporate security awareness and driving it into our DNA is part of what makes Cisco—a company dedicated to continuous improvement—unique as a top industry leader.

The message is clear: security must be pervasive in every aspect of every product we design, develop, and deploy. It’s what our customers expect, and SecCon is one of the major delivery vehicles for creating a unified front within the engineering community as part of Cisco’s evolution towards the Internet of Everything. The more the world becomes interconnected, the more important it is that product designers, developers, testers, and implementers are aware and educated about the importance of the security mindset. How we think about security dictates how we act. This is something the Cisco leadership team is keenly aware of, and their intent to mature security capabilities and features into our entire product line is evident as they work to bring together industry security advocates to drive change and continuous improvement at the annual SecCon conference.

Chris Young, SVP of the Security and Government Group kicked off the event with a powerful keynote speech that discussed, in great detail, the leadership vision of the future:

“Dream, and make dreams come true from design to delivery.” Chris then shared feedback from his interactions with CIO’s from across the industry and the cyber security challenges they face. He stated that “Customer infrastructures are evolving to become the ‘any to any’ problem, meaning any user, on any device, on any connection type, going to any application.”

This is a huge challenge the industry at large is facing, and Cisco is uniquely positioned as an industry leader to make a significant impact on our growing customer base by continuing to re-enforce, drive, and mature Internet security by driving a cultural shift beyond security as standalone products or feature sets, and instead as part of a holistic secure end-to-end product line driven through architecture.

Building community, raising awareness, and making security part of the corporate DNA is the clear path forward for Cisco.

Send us your questions or comments about this post or other posts as part of the blog series devoted to SecCon 2012. We look forward to hearing from you!

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