Cisco reveals new approach to dominate enterprise security market

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 03 March 2010 14:19

IT Industry - Strategy

Cisco is making a renewed push to be a lead player in the enterprise network security market with the launch of the Cisco Secure Borderless Network architecture.

Cisco claims that its new approach will offer improved enterprise security by focusing on four critical areas: enterprise endpoints (mobile or fixed), the Internet edge, the data centre and policy that is context - and location-aware.

It also announced the first two products within this architecture: Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility - software for PCs and handheld devices - and an expansion of Cisco TrustSec, Cisco's policy-based access control technology.

Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Security Technology business unit, said the company aimed to be number one or two security vendor in Cisco's core markets (service provider and enterprise networks).

"Make no mistake, security is an absolute priority at Cisco. The company has invested more than $US1 billion in security acquisitions in the past three years...Cisco's ambitions in areas like virtualisation, cloud computing, mobility and collaboration cannot really take hold without security in the network as a foundation. That being so, Cisco has been investing very heavily in security advances for business networks."

Gillis said that Cisco's approach to security was being driven by two major trends. "First is the trend toward mobility. More users are accessing more content from more different types of devices than ever before, and [secondly] it's not just employees. Companies need to find safe ways to allow 'outsiders' such as customers, contractors and partners to access sensitive information [from] devices the company can't directly control.

"We're also seeing a trend toward mobility of data through cloud computing, where data is stored not on the company premises but in the cloud - whether it's software as a service (SaaS), security as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service...It's more and more likely that users and the data they're connecting to may or may not be behind the firewall."

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