Simplify to Secure: Reduce Complexity by Integrating Your Security Ecosystem

Having a difficult time balancing simplicity in security? You’re not alone. In our latest cybersecurity report, “Simplify to Secure,” we explore the consequences of stringing together point cybersecurity products and the complexity this can cause in your organization – along with the impacts on the effectiveness of the security ecosystem you’ve built.

Quickly deploying a new technology without considering how it will integrate with your security ecosystem can have significant implications. In the report, we shine a light on how to unify visibility, automate critical workflows, strengthen security, and give your team the time back to focus on what’s most critical.

My CISO peers have shared that better visibility and integration are two topics dominating their cybersecurity agendas. I get it – securing your digital transformation can be a complicated process, let alone the effort to manage this with an eye on the future. As your business grows and matures, your security must evolve with it. Why? Because your teams’ security maturity should advance (and grow) with solutions you already have in place.

About the Report

You’ll find in the report that we’ve used survey findings and expert advice from conversations with your CISO peers and security practitioners to explore trends in security technology integration and vendor consolidation to reduce complexity. We talk about unifying and simplifying your ecosystem. We discuss enhancing ROI on your existing investments through an integrated approach. This information can be of great importance to help you make decisions about managing security in the future – transforming from attack blocker to business enabler.

“Digital organizations seeking to reduce complexity and manage risk more efficiently will leverage an integrated security platform for unified visibility and intelligence, operational efficiency, and simplified security. This approach enables our security team to stop being product integrators, instead focusing on what matters most – securing our solutions to help our customers achieve their goals with confidence.”
—Brad Arkin, Senior Vice President and Chief Security and Trust Officer, Cisco

Our data-driven insights, along with the depth and breadth of guidance from our CISO Advisors, will equip you to make the case for a platform approach to security — one that transforms the way your people, processes, and technology interact to deliver better outcomes.

Here are some of the highlights of the report:

Simplify, don’t multiply: Every new solution that does not natively integrate with your existing technology contributes to siloed visibility and creates complexity – often leading to higher threat dwell time from gaps.
Operational inefficiencies impact breach readiness and response: Our 2020 CISO Benchmark data shows a negative correlation between the number of vendors and products in your security ecosystem and the resulting downtime, records impacted, and financial impact of attacks.
Lack of integration hinders your ability to identify and prioritize alerts: The multi-vendor approach usually escalates into an overwhelming number of alerts, hindering your ability to prioritize them.
A platform helps you achieve more effective security: Organizations need foundational platform capabilities built in across the portfolio to realize the full potential of all security investments.

No matter what approach you take to advance your security ecosystem, partnering with the right vendor will help you achieve your goals today while setting you up for future success. Work with partners who have the breadth of technology, depth of threat visibility and intelligence, and proven execution experience needed to deliver the latest innovations to meet your evolving needs.

Don’t know where to start? Check out the 10 critical questions in the report that security professionals should consider when looking at vendor products and solutions.

Protecting What’s Now and What’s Next

Cisco Security continues to build a simplified experience for our customers –one that helps reduce complexity, strengthen operations, and enable teams to spend more time on higher-value initiatives. For several years, we’ve been working to integrate our security portfolio across all the control points, so that our solutions work seamlessly on the backend. We recently unveiled Cisco SecureX, a cloud-native platform that completely changes the user experience. Connecting the breadth of our integrated security portfolio and customers’ security infrastructure, it unifies visibility; enables automation; simplifies analytics; and strengthens security across network, endpoint, cloud and applications. In our new Simplify to Secure report, we talk about how the Cisco SecureX can take your security architecture to the next level, connecting the backend to a unified frontend, as well as integrate your existing third party security investments. We are excited to bring this innovation to our customers, but this is just the first step in the journey.

When it comes to securing your next digital transformation initiative, my advice is simple: Start with a platform. With an open platform, your security teams can easily integrate existing products with future cutting-edge products.

If these strategies resonate with you, or provoke additional areas of inquiry, we’d love to hear from you.