Cisco showcases security innovations

Cisco has introduced new capabilities across its security portfolio so teams can be more productive and protected wherever they are working from. Unveiled at Cisco’s annual Partner Summit conference, the news demonstrates continued progress towards the strategic vision of the Cisco Security Cloud that will protect the integrity of an organization’s entire IT ecosystem. The end-to-end platform will safeguard users, devices and applications across public clouds and private data centers, without public cloud lock-in. 

“Security is no longer optional. It is critical to every major initiative an organization may have,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “We are committed to delivering more value for our partners by continuing to drive innovation and making it easier to do business with Cisco. Partners can land key products and then expand across the Cisco Secure portfolio to increase profitability while enabling customers to securely achieve their digital transformation goals.”

Zero Trust

Duo Passwordless Authentication is now available for all customers to protect Single Sign On (SSO) applications. Users can login without any password by leveraging biometrics (Windows Hello and Mac touch ID) and security keys. Cisco is also adding the Duo Mobile app as a new option for passwordless authentication. This will simplify implementation and lower the total cost of ownership for customers, as well as better meet the needs of all end-users as global biometric adoption stalled after several years of sharp growth. Among Duo customers, biometrics were enabled on 81 percent of mobile devices.

The findings are from Cisco’s 2022 Duo Trusted Access Report, also released today. The annual study is based on roughly 1.1 billion monthly global authentications, an increase of 38 percent year-over-year, across more than 49 million devices and 490 thousand unique applications.

“Passwordless authentication reduces the risk of phishing attacks and their ability to utilize stolen passwords or as we’ve seen more recently, MFA fatigue,” said Dave Lewis, Global Advisory CISO at Cisco. “As cyberattacks continue to move closer to end-users, there is a huge opportunity to embrace low-friction authentication methods that ensure only trusted users and devices gain access to applications and corporate resources.”

Network Security

Employees are going back in the office. Among Duo customers, remote access authentications declined since peaking in 2020, reaching lower than pre-pandemic levels in 2022. As hybrid work becomes the new normal, organizations are demanding high-performance network security without the increased cost.

To better meet the needs of customers, Cisco is introducing the newest addition to the Secure Firewall 3100 Series, the first firewalls purpose-built for hybrid work. Secure Firewall 3105 expands sizing options for branch offices at a price point accessible to more organizations. It empowers hybrid workers with support for more remote users and increases VPN speed and performance by 17X.

Initially launching in the US, Cisco Capital is now offering Cisco Lifecycle Pay for Secure Firewall, a Cisco Capital fixed term subscription payment solution, to provide a financial incentive and lower total cost of usage without the burden of ownership. Customers can receive a 10 percent replacement incentive when returning existing firewall hardware and upgrading to Cisco’s latest qualifying firewall technology. Cisco Capital offers a global suite of segment-and architecture-agnostic payment solutions that enable partners to better support their customers and match their buying preferences.

Secure Connectivity

As critical resources are moved into cloud, customers are concerned about data vulnerability. The challenge is only growing, as authentications to cloud applications increased 24 percent in 2022. Data needs to be protected, not just because of the risk tied to malicious threat actors, but the unintentional issues caused by inexperienced users. To help with this, Cisco is enhancing Umbrella with stronger data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities, including unified policies and reporting across API-based out-of-band DLP, and real-time inline DLP, making management easier for security teams.

Umbrella is a foundational component of Cisco+ Secure Connect, Cisco’s unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution. Highlighting their abilities with the integrated networking and security architecture, partners can now achieve SASE specialization to help customers securely enable cloud development and deployment, remote work, and edge computing.