Companies face a critical issue now: intruders are exploiting the weakest connections in their systems, such as unsecured customers, devices, and workloads. The transition from traditional data centres to distributed environments, where protecting distributed data across multiple touchpoints becomes challenging, makes this threat environment more difficult.

To address these threats, some organizations resort to using various protection tools, leading to segmented teams, technology stacks, and control systems that prevent effective surveillance. This divided approach results in unnecessary costs, more deployment times, uneven security, and essential gaps.

These problems are made worse by surveillance products that lack integration or profit from one another. Network security administrators, for instance, struggle to put together cohesive team and tools for effective policy implementation. Moreover, customers frequently use surveillance tools under-require, which leads to poor security practices and failures that increase the risk of a breach. Organizations are unable to effectively determine issues that cause operational challenges due to manual monitoring of various tools. Therefore, the problem has been placed on the client to identify the gaps and make the best use of the tools.

Uneven safety policies, fragmented management, lack of integrated visibility, misconfiguration risks, and cybersecurity skills shortage are all important challenges organizations face. The intensity is highlighted by the findings of the IBM X-For Hazard Intelligence report, which highlight these issues facing organizations. According to the report, the average time from initial access to ransomware deployment has dropped from 1637 hours ( about 2 months 1 week ) to just 92 hours ( less than 4 days ) in 2023. Successful and integrated security solutions are more important than ever because of this drastic time-saving, reducing threats and limiting organization’s ability to respond.

Without a centralized system, gaining a holistic perspective of safety is challenging. Misconfiguration detection is error-prone and can lead to vulnerabilities in mechanical methods. To completely utilize safety features and maximize ROI, there is a lack of training, tools, and skills. Users must implement best practices, which demand professional training and time. Due to the variety of safety products, it takes a while to resolve access or policy issues. Administrators devote a lot of time to creating related procedures across various programs. Operational problems are often addressed dynamically, leading to interruption and suboptimal efficiency. Non-actionable emails and enormous amounts of data cause paralysis and stifle decision-making, and there is no sense of urgency. There is a significant opportunity for the security industry to give regular surveillance across these various contacts, even though we may never completely eliminate distributed protection items.

A consolidated safety platform aims to address these issues by providing a comprehensive overview of the protection landscape, facilitating consistent policy enforcement, reducing troubleshooting, and providing AI-aided insights. So, it lessens one’s dependence on specific skills and cognitive load. The ultimate goal of Unified Security Management ( USM) is a seamless management experience.

To meet the unique needs of different organizations and support various community network configurations, our method focuses on three core objectives: improving operations, enhancing security, and improving clarity. We aim to optimize security management processes, strengthen defenses with superior Zero Trust and vulnerability protection, and offer clear, practical insights through Iot- driven intelligence. These focused efforts are designed to deliver a more intuitive, robust, and user- friendly security solution.

Customer Experiences with Cloud-based Security

AIOps, a game-changing tool for increasing operational efficiency and bolstering security, is a big hit with us. AIOps prevents downtime by reinforcing network performance and addressing serious IT issues like misconfigurations and traffic spikes. AIOps provides automation and predictive insights to help administrators improve security and lower costs. We are introducing key features, such as policy analysis and optimization, best practice recommendations, traffic insights, and capacity forecasting. By incorporating AIOps into our services, we adopt a more strategic and proactive approach to safeguard and optimize your network infrastructure’s performance and security.

Check out Cisco Firewall: Managing Firewall Complexity and Augmenting Effectiveness with AIOps for more information.

Best Practice Recommendations: Nudging admins to get to better security state

AIOps ‘ predictive insights

Benefits of AIOps

Our solution was created to support the management of a variety of firewall form factors, ensuring comprehensive security from the ground up. It seamlessly integrates with various deployment models, including physical and virtual firewalls ( Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense ), Multicloud Defense, Hypershield, and Adaptive Security Appliances ( ASA ).

With all of your network’s resources in one place, you can manage your security infrastructure more effectively and easily.

In streamlining security operations, our partnership with Splunk is significant. By integrating with Splunk, we increase the capabilities of both on-site and cloud-based firewalls for oversight and monitoring. Utilizing Splunk’s powerful data processing, analytics, and real- time logging strengths, we deliver an enriched, responsive, and comprehensive view of your security posture.

This collaborative effort simplifies the management of security operations, providing Security Operations Center ( SOC ) teams with a superior, streamlined, and more effective method for protecting their digital landscapes.

Our customers now have access to a unified dashboard that gives them a complete, in-depth view of the entire network and cloud security ecosystem. Customers can coordinate multiple tenants under the control of a centralized global administrator and manage tens of thousands of security devices effectively.

Unified Dashboard: A Comprehensive view of firewall and security services

With the Firewall AI Assistant, we are making administrative tasks even simpler. By tackling the complexity of firewall rule management, it revolutionizes network security. Firewall maintenance becomes a security risk because many organizations deal with over a thousand rules, some of which are out-of-date or conflicting. According to Gartner, misconfigurations could account for 99 % of firewall breaches through 2023, underscoring the need for this AI-driven simplification. Customers may request assistance in developing rules and the Assistant will explain the policies ‘ intentions.

AI Assistant for Firewall: Rule Analysis

AI Assistant for Firewall: Rule Creation

The implementation of seamless object sharing, which is a crucial component of maintaining consistent protection across hybrid networks, is a key security breakthrough. This feature makes it easier for network objects to be distributed across both on-premises firewalls and multi-cloud defenses. By enabling our administrators to create a uniform policy across a range of environments, its main goal is protecting application and workload data wherever they are located. This approach fortifies the security posture of your hybrid environment, and streamlines change management processes, reduce opportunity for errors, thereby, contributing to a more secure, effective, and resilient IT ecosystem.

Consistent Policy Enforcement: Sharing Network Objects across on- prem and Cloud environments

To better serve our customers, we are devoted to constantly improving our services and expanding our global footprint. In conclusion, our vision extends beyond merely supplying tools—we strive to revolutionize the user experience.

Through the fusion of cutting- edge technology and intuitive design, our goal is to foster a supportive environment for administrators, where operations are efficient, and security is strong. By providing a Unified Security Platform that gives customers the ability to achieve the best level of security, we are dedicated to reducing the burden on the customer.

Stay secure!


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