Cisco Live 2019: How Businesses Can Secure Data in the Cloud — and with It
Cisco Systems this week rolled out a range of security solutions for a cloud-first world to thousands of customers and partners attending its annual Cisco Live conference in San Diego, including new capabilities built into its Umbrella cloud security platform and a cloud-enabled security camera that allows users to transport themselves into remote locations with virtual reality.
The Cisco Meraki MV line of cameras, which are available now, are designed to be simple to deploy and manage in the cloud from a single console while delivering high-end video capabilities, including VR. As Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager at Cisco Meraki, demonstrated, users can don a set of VR goggles and see what the 3D camera sees as if they’re in the room.
Although Meraki is well-known for its networking solutions, including software-defined WAN, “digital infrastructure does not begin and end with networking, and the last few years focused on the development of the simple, secure digital workspace,” said Nightingale.
“This camera is a great example of that dream,” he added. “It stores months of video, delivers machine-learning-based analytics without GPU appliances and whether you have one camera or 100,000 cameras, you’ll never install anything but the camera itself. It’s just the camera, the cloud and nothing else.”
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How Cisco Helps Businesses Secure SD-WAN
Cisco also demonstrated its advancements in securing customers' SD-WAN environments with Umbrella, its cloud-native security solution.
Gee Rittenhouse, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Business Group, said the company was following its decision last year to integrate certain security solutions into its on-premises SD-WAN appliances with a commitment to do the same with Umbrella.
“We have integrated everything we have into Umbrella, our cloud-native security platform,” Rittenhouse said. “It’s all unified together, giving you a level of ease and simplicity that’s just one click away with Umbrella.”
Users point their domain name servers at Umbrella and traffic flows through it when a cloud service is accessed. Umbrella evaluates the integrity of the site and denies access to anything malicious. Brian Roddy, vice president of cloud security at Cisco, demonstrated the simplicity of setting up Umbrella within a branch office of a business.
“Within a few clicks it’ll automatically provision this identity, it will automatically intercept all the DNS and send it to the cloud and provision the security policy,” Roddy said. “So, within a few clicks, we have great visibility into the environment — we can see if there are malware infections on devices. And because customers typically see a 90 percent drop in malware when they deploy Cisco’s DNS security, we get a great level of protection.”
VIDEO: See what it takes to better manage workloads in the cloud.
Cisco Is Changing Its Certification Program
Cisco also announced a revamp of its certification program to address the growing role of software in network environments. The changes include new professional certifications for developers utilizing Cisco’s DevNet developer community.
“We’ve been talking to all of our networkers, and what they’re telling us is that the biggest problem they’re dealing with is network automation,” said Susie Wee, senior vice president and CTO of Cisco DevNet, explaining the impetus for one change. “So, what we’ve done is created the DevNet Automation Exchange, and what we’re doing is helping people use Cisco’s multidomain network — all of the different capabilities that we have built into the devices, built into the controllers, and we’re helping people use all that.”
Read articles and check out videos from BizTech’s coverage of Cisco Live 2019 here.
