Cisco security balances protection and power to deliver highly secure collaboration.
With Cisco security solutions, you can connect, communicate, and conduct business securely while protecting users, information, applications, and the network.
Cisco pervasive security can help your organization:
- Minimize security and compliance IT risk
- Reduce the IT administrative burden
- Lower the total cost of ownership
What Is Network Security?
Today's collaborative business operations require an integrated security approach to help ensure regulatory compliance, protect data, and defend against botnets.
A new generation of interactive business communication and collaboration technologies provides tremendous productivity and flexibility gains for organizations of all kinds. But this unprecedented connectivity also unleashes new, complex security risks, including:
- Increased exposure to security threats—Ubiquitous access to Web-enabled applications and services enables users to work from anywhere, anytime—but also places businesses at risk anywhere, anytime.
- An eroding network perimeter—The traditional network barriers that separated trusted from untrusted and “inside” from “outside” are now disappearing. As more applications become directly accessible to remote users and systems, the concept of the network perimeter becomes increasingly vague and more difficult to protect.
- Evolving threats—Information attacks of the past were largely an issue of cyber-vandalism, with hackers primarily looking for fame. Today’s attacks are a profit-driven business, often controlled by organized crime. The modern attacker uses a patient, “stealth” approach to eventually achieve a successful attack. In addition, modern attackers often avoid technology defenses, using spam, phishing attacks, and fraudulent Web links to target an organization’s weakest link: human beings.
As security risks have evolved, so have organizations’ approaches to them. Where information security was once a technology issue, today it is a business issue—representing a more significant cost and operational challenge, but a fundamental business enabler as well. More and more organizations are implementing formal programs to reduce IT risk, especially security and compliance risks. As regulatory compliance becomes a core requirement for organizations in more industries, businesses must develop new capabilities for controlling the kinds of information traversing their network, how that information is used, and who can access it. Organizations not only face the challenge of becoming compliant, but of staying compliant as the network continuously evolves with business needs.
Streamline IT Risk Management for Security and Compliance
A connected world presents complex network security challenges. Business technologies such as interactive Websites, collaborative tools, service-oriented architectures (SOA), and virtualization proliferate within an increasingly sophisticated threat environment. Threats from an eroding perimeter, unsolicited e-mail, botnets, malware, and information theft disrupt productivity, adversely affect customer relationships, and erode profits. IT departments must manage security risks while ensuring regulatory compliance.
Cisco Security Services
Today's security and compliance challenges require a systems approach. The Cisco Self-Defending Network enables companies to:
- Design a trusted infrastructure that protects against business disruption
- Evolve and operate effectively while maintaining a secure, compliant environment
- A hallmark of this comprehensive, flexible approach to security is the ability to integrate new services in spite of increasing external and internal threats.
The Cisco Self-Defending Network enables IT organizations to:
- Rapidly identify and respond to evolving threats
- Enforce business policies
- Protect critical assets
- Decrease complexity
- Ease the administrative burden of IT
- Lower total cost of ownership