Cisco's regional office announced on Wednesday new additions to its portfolio that aim to bolster both the fundamental components of a network security infrastructure and the delivery of cloud security services. The organization has highlighted the importance of the ability for businesses to collaborate with greater confidence at a time when employees are becoming increasingly mobile and interactive. The new Cisco product offerings have been formulated to incorporate a greater defense against attacks from malign threats such as malware and botnets, regardless of where professionals connect and communicate. The technology includes Cisco Security Cloud, which supports the recently announced Hosted Email Security Services as well as Global Correlation - a new technique that powers integrated security services. New Cisco ASA 5500 Series 8.2 Software has been designed to provide end-to-end protection for offices of all sizes, improving threat mitigation and enabling companies to more securely connect, communicate, and conduct business. Within this application, a new Botnet Traffic Filter helps to identifying infected clients, improves IPS availability for small offices and increases clientless remote-access capabilities. Cisco SAFE, in turn, is a security reference architecture that provides prescriptive validated design guides to help organizations plan, design, and deploy security solutions across the network; such as in campus offices and data centers. “As collaboration trends extend communications outside company offices, businesses must re-examine how they protect their extended enterprises,” said Talha Jarad, Business Development manager for information Security, Cisco Saudi Arabia. “While the flexibility inherent in business applications, social media, software as a service and wireless technologies is leading to widespread adoption and interactive business models, those very technologies and business models are jeopardized by threats that are just as agile,” he added. Much of the basis for Cisco's announcement was highlighted when Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers recently delivered a keynote speech entitled ‘Collaborate with Confidence,' which expanded on these security trends and described his perspective on the heightened importance of network security in a collaborative world. The Chairman's outlined philosophy is evident in the Cisco Information Technology Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (IT GRC) Security Assessment Services; which helps organizations establish a single program for reducing information security risk and the cost of compliance by aligning business and technology strategies. As well as allowing businesses to balance the need for collaboration and information sharing with privacy and information control, IT GRC also provides a comprehensive assessment of a business' security policies and maps them against the requirements of a common control framework, in order to identify gaps and make recommendations for resolving them. “In today's changing world, businesses require a thought-out security strategy that accounts for the physical, virtual, mobile and global aspects of their business,” revealed Jarad. “Our vision for security is based on a balance of protection and enablement, which integrates security from the network through to the endpoint and the user.”
