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Digital transformation and new hybrid work models have created a highly distributed and diverse IT landscape. Organizations must run applications on-premises, in public and private clouds, and as SaaS to support the hybrid workforce. As a result of working across different types of environments, organizations may face multiple operating models, disparate management domains, and vendor sprawl, which can lead to uncontrollable TCO and lack of a holistic IT strategy.

Security continues to be top-of-mind for today’s global enterprises, confirmed in both the 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report and the 2023 Global Networking Trends Report from Cisco. Our Global Networking Trends Report also found that when addressing security concerns, most of today’s organizations want a consistent operating model across their IT environment (86 percent) and a simplified approach to managing their technology (85 percent).

Organizations also struggle to recruit and retain the security experts they need for 24x7x365 protection. The ability to effectively use AI and automation tools gains importance for organizations looking to manage increasingly complex infrastructures. As you know, managed service partners hold a unique position to address these needs, with proven methodologies to standardize and create repeatable operating models, leveraging OEMs like Cisco to work toward achieving their customers’ business goals.

Managed Security services represent a total addressable market (TAM) opportunity of more than US$58 billion in global product revenue by 2027. Using our extensive portfolio, you can expand your service offerings and deliver improved security solutions to your customers. Strong, effective security has become the enabler for achieving current and future business outcomes. Cisco has the technological expertise, the infrastructure, the portfolio, and the integrations to support our service providers in delivering these outcomes. Cisco brings a long history of success in working with and supporting our Provider Partners in delivering the solutions that customers need.

Managed Security enables business outcomes

The Cisco Partner Managed Security portfolio provides efficiency, automation tools, and better operating models so you can enhance the value you bring to your customers. Cisco is moving to a platform-based strategy that is rooted in standardizing the user interface and experience (UI/UX) across the product portfolio. With a consistent UI/UX, you can develop standardized, repeatable operating models, and can build solutions that can bolt on new services as enablement and customer interest grows. For example, Provider Partners with Security solutions can leverage Digital Experience Monitoring to upsell and enable Full-Stack Observability.

The following table depicts numerous Managed Security services that support business outcomes. Modern businesses are data-driven, and therefore protecting an organization’s data and critical applications becomes central to supporting that organization’s performance and growth.

Managed Security Blog Solution Graphic-v2

We can help you build your managed security services catalog to support the business outcomes your end customers want. For example:

  • Optimize the application experience to provide end users with seamless access to the tools they need for their jobs. Security leads the effort for anytime-anywhere access.
  • Deliver secure environments with consistent, comprehensive security parameters around a standard policy to protect from internal and external threats.
  • Connect everything with confidence using managed detection, including third-party devices that need to connect into the infrastructure.
  • Elevate the hybrid experience to provide consistency and high performance using tools such as Duo and multi-factor authentication to enforce secure access, no matter where the workforce is located.

With the convergence of network and security, Cisco brings a unique perspective to help you deliver simplified, connected experiences and richer security. And Cisco continues to bring new solutions to market to help our Provider Partners and customers grow their portfolios and profitability.

Expanded security solutions announced

As announced at Partner Summit 2023, we’ve expanded our partner managed-ready solutions with security-based items:

  • Managed Firewall
  • Managed XDR (Extended Detection and Response)

Managed Firewall: Firewall security provides the foundation you can build from to add protection for users, cloud access, and the overall customer enterprise. Cisco Firepower and Cisco Cloud Defense Orchestrator provide the core technologies needed to defend the ever-expanding threat vectors your customers face. With Firepower products, you can enhance your security services catalog with VPN, intrusion detection and response, and multi-cloud defense-leveraging gateways. Cisco can help you expand your service catalog to address additional security use cases for your customers and provide value-added services such as Unified Threat Management. For more information on Managed Firewall, read Nathaniel Hang’s blog on Firewall as a Service; it explains how next-gen firewalls support modern networks and lists expected business outcomes confirmed by Forrester research.

Managed XDR: This emerging solution uses the Cisco XDR platform to reduce time for threat detection, analysis, and full exfiltration. We’re using machine learning, AIOps, and telemetry data (including outside sources) to build correlations and upscale the level of work performed by security and network engineers. With Managed XDR from Cisco, you can drive better operating models, new routes to market, and enhanced value for your customers with a solution that helps detect threats more quickly, prioritize by potential impact, lower investigation time, accelerate a response, and extend the device context.

Secure Access: With this solution, Cisco can help you differentiate from other providers. Cisco Secure Access provides a frictionless user experience, allowing workers to authenticate once and then work on any application. With this service, you can eliminate the extra steps often required for VPN access. Once users connect, Secure Access provides continuous and transparent security inspections that block known bad destinations and files, alert on suspicious traffic and behaviors, and protect sensitive data. Details on Cisco Secure Access can be found in this blog by Jeff Scheaffer.

Ready to move forward?

These enhanced Managed Security solutions can help you improve your customers’ overall security posture and free up their internal resources to focus on strategic business objectives. Cisco is ready to help you position and differentiate your services as you build out your service catalog.

You can leverage our experience to expand your business. We work with 62,000 partners globally, support 70,000 cloud security customers, handle more than 600 billion DNS requests per day, process more than 5 billion reputation requests, and evaluate 2.1 million malware samples. As a result, more than 1.7 million networks are protected using Cisco products.

#GoManaged!

 

 

Learn more about how you can begin building next-generation managed security solutions:

Visit the Cisco Partner Managed Services page

Watch From platform to profit: how MSPs can leverage Cisco to deliver performance, impact and experience from Cisco Partner Summit 2023

 

 


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Authors

Jamin Silverstein

Sales Business Development Manager

Partner Managed and XaaS Sales Organization