2015 - Page 117 of 217

June 9, 2015 Leave a Comment

How Cisco ACI Stands out from other Network Virtualization Solutions – Part 3

[Note: This is part 3 in a three part series of blogs discussing how Cisco ACI stands alone in the market. Part 1 | Part 2]

In part 1 we talked about how Cisco ACI simplifies diagnosis and enables DevOps Model compared to competing network virtualization solutions.

In part 2 we talked about how Cisco ACI enables organizations to proactively assure SLAs and supports efficient and scalable architecture for demanding applications.

In part 3 we’ll look at a couple of scenarios impacting security and cloud IT teams. Again, we’ll review it from ACI perspective and compare that to other network virtualization solutions.

1) ACI Secures Bare Metal and Virtual Applications

Security and compliance are always top of mind for most organizations especially if they’re in the healthcare and financial industries. The challenge for these organizations is multi-fold; whether it is related to ensuring security rules are applied correctly and consistently across the entire infrastructure, responding quickly to security breaches and threats, enforcing compliance, etc.

Let’s zoom in on a common scenario that customers are facing today which is managing physical and virtual firewalls to secure both bare metal and virtual apps in a consistent fashion. The need to apply these policies consistently becomes more critical as organizations add virtual firewalls to secure East – West traffic in addition to physical firewalls. With Cisco ACI, all security management occurs from a single place, APIC. Security IT admins will be able to apply whatever policies required for bare metal and virtual applications without worrying about network settings. This means no errors that lead to downtime and faster service deployment to meet business velocity.

The other advantage with an ACI approach is the ability to seamlessly scale the infrastructure without compromise on security.

The approach in virtual network solutions will be limited to virtual firewalls and specific hypervisor. This means inconsistent policy management across physical and virtual environments that can compromise overall security and compliance.

See Joe Onisick detailing this here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eCJgK4YaoU&index=1

2) ACI Automates Cloud Infrastructure For Any App And Environment

Surveys have shown that the majority of customers deploy multi-hypervisors strategy for various reasons. As such, organizations have to manage workloads on different virtualization stacks and are building a cloud strategy to ensure seamless operation and management.

So a true multi-hypervisor approach is required, and one that can bring the same level of service for all virtualization options and emerging cloud stacks.

See Joe Onisick here talking about a specific scenario where customers want to automate and orchestrate multiple hypervisors and bare metal servers environment in an open fashion. With ACI, we’re hypervisor agnostic and provide open RESTful API’s that allows them to automate and orchestrate through a system of their choice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvdILBuxClU&index=2

When you look at network virtualization solutions you’re limited to a single hypervisor but if you want to go with multi-hypervisors you end up with multiple control system.

Tags: ACI, application networking services, data center, products, SDN, technology, virtualization

Authors

Rami Rammaha

Sr. Marketing Manager

IDS

June 8, 2015 Leave a Comment

Collaboration Notes from Cisco Live: Monday Wrap-Up

Kim Austin

The games have begun! It’s the official start to Cisco Live 2015 here in sunny San Diego. I started my morning with digital calisthenics to prepare my digits for the keyboarding ahead. And it was a good thing I did because there was plenty about which to tweet. If you’re looking for the collaboration perspective of goings on throughout the show, I’m here to provide it via Twitter (@ciscokima) and nightly wrap-ups of the day’s activities. Read on for: Opening Keynote with John Chambers, Captain of the New Guard, Collaboration in the World of Solutions, What’s Up for Tuesday?, and #MEOW.

Opening Keynote with John Chambers

Despite the fact that it outsized a football field — or a futbol pitch for that matter — the room was full long before Chambers ran on stage. Although it was his final keynote as CEO, he focused on the future and what organizations need to do to next. In ten years, it’s predicted that 40% of today’s enterprise companies will no longer exist. Chambers points to four reasons. Companies that fail:

Miss market transitions
Do the “right thing” for too long
Don’t reinvent themselves
Get too far from their customers

So what’s his advice? He provided plenty. Disrupt or be disrupted. Have the ability to make a change before the rest of the world knows it’s possible. Just because you won in the last information age doesn’t mean you’ll win in the digital age. (Honestly, it was a fiesta of tweetable and bloggable soundbites.) Continue reading “Collaboration Notes from Cisco Live: Monday Wrap-Up”

Authors

Kim Austin

No Longer with Cisco

“Security Everywhere” – Enterprise Branch Security for Direct Internet Access

Hai Bo Ma

Two weeks ago, a leading global medical device manufacturer came to Cisco for advice. In an effort to streamline IT operations and reduce operating costs, the customer had recently migrated from their internal Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment to Office365, Microsoft’s hosted online service.

The migration was initially done for the headquarter users and the feedback was more positive than they expected. However, when they migrated their branch and remote office users, the WAN bandwidth usage almost immediately spiked and user experience suffered as a result.

This customer is certainly not the only company looking to embrace Cloud applications for greater agility, reduced costs and complexity, and increased productivity. Or has had to deal with BYOD issues and the increasing impact of video has on their bandwidth. However, what our customer and those other companies have found is that the current method of backhauling the traffic to the data center is no longer a viable way to handle the increased consumption when faced with a flat or even a declining IT budget. Therefore, many of today’s distributed enterprises are looking to use direct Internet access pathways in an effort to improve the user experience while reducing IT costs.

However, enabling direct Internet access (DIA) at branch offices also forfeits the inherent threat protection that traffic routed through the data center provides. The enterprise-level risks that branch offices face with BYOD issues, compliance requirements, and advanced persistent threats require enterprise-level security. According to Gartner’s “Bring Branch Office Network Security Up to the Enterprise Standard”, “By 2016, 30% of advanced targeted threats — up from less than 5% today — will specifically target branch offices as an entry point.”

Cisco FirePOWER Threat Defense for ISR addresses these issues by extending their industry-leading FirePOWER threat protection beyond its traditional network edge and data center deployments out to individual Cisco ISR routers. Continue reading ““Security Everywhere” – Enterprise Branch Security for Direct Internet Access”

Authors

Hai Bo Ma

Product Manager, Engineering

2 Comments

The Network as a Security Sensor and Enforcer

Pankaj Gupta

The Digital Economy and the Internet of Everything means everything is now connected. Digitization is fundamentally transforming how we conduct business. It creates new opportunities to develop services and engage with employees, partners, and customers. It’s important to understand that digitization is also an opportunity for the hacking community, presenting new services, information, data, devices, and network traffic as attack targets. To take full advantage of the digitization opportunity, security must be everywhere, embedded into and across the extended network – from the data center to the mobile endpoints and onto the factory floor.

Today, Cisco is announcing enhanced and embedded security solutions across the extended network and into the intelligent network infrastructure. These solutions extend security capabilities to more control points than ever before with Cisco FirePOWER, Cisco Cloud Web Security or Cisco Advanced Malware Protection. This is highlighted in Scott Harrell’s blog. We are also transforming the Cisco network into two roles: as a sensor and as an enforcer of security.

The role of the Network as a Sensor The network provides broad and deep visibility into network traffic flow patterns and rich threat intelligence information that allows more rapid identification of security threats. Cisco IOS NetFlow is at the heart of the network as a sensor, capturing comprehensive network flow data. You can think of NetFlow as analogous to the detail you get in your monthly cellular phone bill. It tells you who talked to whom, for every device and user, for how long, and what amount of data was transferred – it’s metadata for your network traffic.

Visibility to network traffic through NetFlow is critical for security, as it serves as a valuable tool to identify anomalous traffic on your network. Watching NetFlow, we gain an understanding of the baseline traffic on the network, and can alert on traffic that is out of the ordinary. The network is generating NetFlow data from across the enterprise network all the way down to the virtual machines in the data center. This gives us visibility across the entire network, from the furthest branch office down to the east-west traffic in the data center. Continue reading “The Network as a Security Sensor and Enforcer”

Authors

Pankaj Gupta

Director, Market Management

Enterprise PSM - Portfolio, Software, and Campus Switching

Security and What Matters Most…

Sanjeev Mervana

Summer is officially in full swing. My kids have finished with another school year. Our family vacation has been planned. When the family is away on vacation together, I worry a bit about the safety and security of our home, our personal information and of course our physical well-being when traveling. Still, even with ever more creative ways for cyber adversaries to disrupt our lives, for the most part, the systems in place have been successful at helping us avoid major catastrophe.

Our service provider customers are no different: They also worry about the safety and security of their networks and infrastructures Continue reading “Security and What Matters Most…”

Authors

Sanjeev Mervana

Vice President of Product Management

Emerging Technologies & Incubation

1 Comment

Security Everywhere Across the Extended Network

Scott Harrell

The digital economy and the Internet of Everything (IoE) are creating a host of new opportunities. With as many as 50 billion connected devices by 2020, this wave of digitization will spell new opportunities for organizations and governments and the consumers and citizens they serve.

Yet, the more things become connected, the more opportunities exist for malicious actors as well. We are now dealing with a new world where more and more devices are creating a broader and more diverse attack surface that can be exploited.

Attackers are becoming stealthier, better organized, collaborating extensively, and are well resourced. According to the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report, malware is becoming increasingly sophisticated and elusive. Since 2009, we have seen a 66 percent compound annual growth rate of detected security incidents.

In order to respond faster to threats and achieve better outcomes requires a tightly integrated security architecture that is as pervasive as the devices and services we are protecting. For this reason, we believe that the most effective way to confront these challenges is to evolve to an approach that extends security everywhere – both embedded into the intelligent network infrastructure and pervasive across the extended network – from the service provider to the enterprise network infrastructure, data center, IoT, cloud and endpoint. This is essential to protect today’s wide array of attack vectors while positioning security to act as a growth engine to enable companies to seize new business opportunities.

Continue reading “Security Everywhere Across the Extended Network”

Authors

Scott Harrell

Senior Vice President and General Manager

Enterprise Networking Business

Leveraging the Network as a Security Sensor and Policy Enforcer

Sanjay Raja

The topic of cybersecurity has become so ubiquitous that it’s almost a daily occurrence to read or hear about security breaches in the news. Cisco understands this paradigm shift within the nature of computing, that the Digital Economy and the Internet of Everything now requires what we are calling Security Everywhere. Security has to span the extended network in order to protect against an ever growing array of attack vectors. Scott Harrell, Vice President Product Management has written a more detailed blog about this specific topic here .

The key point to note about Security Everywhere is that organizations are under unrelenting attack and breaches are happening every day. Attackers have also created sophisticated malware that can be launched into the network, gather information to intelligently understand exactly what, when and how to attack and then launch an extremely surgical and devastating attack against the network. Our Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report is an excellent resource for detailed research about the nature and frequency of attacks against the enterprise.

Continue reading “Leveraging the Network as a Security Sensor and Policy Enforcer”

Authors

Sanjay Raja

Director, Product and Solution Marketing

Secure Access and Mobility, Cisco Security Business Group

1 Comment

ISE Ecosystem Expands to Drive Deeper Visibility and Control with Cisco Identity Services Engine

Dave D'Aprile

In one of my previous posts, I noted how Network Access Control (NAC) platforms have started evolving into more visibility-focused and context-aware platforms in the face of major business trends such as enterprise mobility, the migration of resources to the cloud, and the ubiquitous Internet of Everything. Consequently, “new NAC” technology has quietly transformed from a complicated set of controls – outdated in a more mobile world – into a powerful business enabler for enterprises.

The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) forecasts that over fifty billion new connected devices will hit networks by the year 2020. With this massive proliferation of network-enabled devices firmly in mind, I am proud to announce that the latest version of the market-leading Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is now available. Cisco Identity Services Engine builds upon the solid foundation of our last release to round out the current platform by focusing on expanding the ISE partner ecosystem with new, exciting categories for context-aware security as well as advancing endpoint security capabilities.

Continue reading “ISE Ecosystem Expands to Drive Deeper Visibility and Control with Cisco Identity Services Engine”

Cisco Blogs

Year: 2015

How Cisco ACI Stands out from other Network Virtualization Solutions – Part 3

Authors

Rami Rammaha

Sr. Marketing Manager

IDS

Kim Austin

No Longer with Cisco

Robert Dimicco

Senior Director

Advanced Services

Hai Bo Ma

Product Manager, Engineering

The Network as a Security Sensor and Enforcer

Authors

Pankaj Gupta

Director, Market Management

Enterprise PSM - Portfolio, Software, and Campus Switching

Sanjeev Mervana

Vice President of Product Management

Emerging Technologies & Incubation

Security Everywhere Across the Extended Network

Authors

Scott Harrell

Senior Vice President and General Manager

Enterprise Networking Business

Leveraging the Network as a Security Sensor and Policy Enforcer

Authors

Sanjay Raja

Director, Product and Solution Marketing

Secure Access and Mobility, Cisco Security Business Group

ISE Ecosystem Expands to Drive Deeper Visibility and Control with Cisco Identity Services Engine

Authors

Dave D'Aprile

Sr. Product/Solutions Marketing Manager

Secure Access and Mobility Product Group