Cisco Live 2023 held in Las Vegas saw a gathering of nearly 20,000 attendees last week with the focus on security. Cisco’s executives noted that security was the top customer topic and the company is making efforts to become a leading security vendor. Cisco Live 2023 was described as the premier networking and security event. With digital transformation underway, security is necessary to support such efforts. To appeal to customers looking to use technology for optimal productivity and efficiency, Cisco is stressing the need for security at its user conference.
The highest increases in spending this year in cybersecurity were noted in TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2023 Technology Spending Intentions Survey following AI and public cloud applications, with strengthening cybersecurity as the leading business initiative. The need for cybersecurity could be fulfilled by technologies being developed by Cisco, such as Cisco Secure Access under the security service edge product, which aims to simplify secure access using any device or application.
Cisco Secure Access offers a single way for users to access all applications and resources while securely steering traffic to private and public destinations without end-user intervention. It provides teams managing access with a centralized view of network traffic, policy, and risk analysis. Equally important is the speed of detection and response for security incidents. This is achieved in part with AI-driven threat intelligence from Cisco Talos.
Cisco’s collaboration with Apple was another big announcement. The two companies are working together to incorporate zero-trust access capabilities into a native experience for users on iOS and macOS. Soon, iPhone, iPad, and Mac will have native support for network relays to provide users with seamless remote access.
After security, AI was the second-biggest topic at Cisco’s conference. Cisco introduced the generative AI-powered Policy Assistant for Cisco Secure Cloud to help security and IT administrators set and maintain security policies. Later in the year, rule sets in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center will increase efficiency in setting policies with granular policy control. When an incident occurs, Cisco’s Security Operations Center Assistant will use generative AI for faster threat detection and response. The assistant will place events in context across email, the web, endpoints, and the network to help SOC analysts identify issues, understand their effect, and determine remediation steps.
Every business needs efficient ways to protect cloud applications. Cisco Panoptica is a product that addresses the visibility challenges of managing cloud-native applications and everything it takes to run them in complex cloud environments. It is integrated with Cisco’s Full Stack Observability Platform and provides real-time visibility through new features and capabilities such as AppDynamics and ThousandEyes, and it will begin providing cloud security posture management (CSPM) features later this year.
Panoptica’s capabilities as a cloud-native application protection platform offer features to help developers better secure their code throughout the software development lifecycle and to help security teams better collaborate with developers to optimize remediation efforts to mitigate risk. In addition to CSPM, Panoptica includes code and build security, cloud workload protection for continuous security for VMs, serverless, containers and more, and application and API security to enable customers to monitor and secure their APIs and API tokens.
With improved security and efficient cloud coverage, Cisco has established itself as a key security vendor with an advantage in networking and connectivity.