Cisco announced Tuesday that its new security platform SecureX will become generally available on June 30. SecureX is the key security product featured as part of Cisco Live, the networking company’s annual customer event that’s taking place virtually this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Introduced in March, SecureX is a cloud-native security platform that aims to give businesses better visibility across their security infrastructure via analytics and workflow automation. According to Cisco, SecureX unifies visibility into a company’s existing security products, including those from Cisco as well as third-party providers.
The platform can analyze data across endpoints, cloud, network, and applications, allowing customers to identify risks and respond to threats more efficiently, Cisco said.
SecureX is the centerpiece of Cisco’s security portfolio and marks the culmination of years of development, said Gee Rittenhouse, the head of Cisco’s security business group.
“Five years ago we started thinking about the key elements that our customers needed to improve their security posture across the enterprise,” said Rittenhouse. “The industry has been thinking about how we make the security experience and protecting the enterprise as simple as possible. We wanted to integrate all of the products our customers use together to help them see threats and to make the rest of the portfolio secure.”
As part of general availability, SecureX will be included with every Cisco Security product going forward.
“The platform comes with the product, it is now a capability that is inherent in our security portfolio,” Rittenhouse said. “It’s the centerpiece of the portfolio — you interact with the rest of the security infrastructure through this unified cloud platform.”
In addition to SecureX going GA, Cisco also announced stronger user and device protection through an integration between endpoint security and MFA. The company is also rolling out Cloud Mailbox Defense for Office365, which strengthens protections against advanced email threats such as phishing, ransomware, spoofing, and spam.
Cisco’s security group is becoming a key growth driver for the company. In Q3, Cisco said security revenue was up 6% with a strong performance in unified threat management, identity and access, and advanced threat. Its cloud security portfolio also performed well with strong double-digit growth and continued momentum around Cisco’s Duo and Umbrella offerings.
Cisco’s security efforts are also closely aligned with the company’s networking strategy. Rittenhouse noted that SecureX offers benefits for both network infrastructure and security operations teams.
“It is easy to use and network teams can use it and gain insights from a security perspective,” said Rittenhouse. “We do see this continued convergence of security and networking, and the industry is recognizing this as well.”
On the networking side, Cisco announced that it’s integrating SD-WAN powered by Viptela with Cisco Umbrella to make it easier for customers to block malicious destinations before a connection is established. Meanwhile, to improve network segmentation, Cisco announced that its DNA Center can now identify previously unknown endpoints at scale, then use various contextual sources and artificial intelligence to logically group them. DNA Center will also have the ability to analyze traffic flows between groups of endpoints to help design segmentation policies. Cisco’s indoor location services platform, Cisco DNA Spaces, is also gaining an Indoor IoT-as-a-Service offering on W-iFi 6 access points.
