Cisco debuts its Secure Service Edge offering and enhances app security

Cisco Systems Inc. today unveiled a new security service edge offering that it says will help enterprises to securely connect their growing portfolios of edge resources, such as cloud, private and software-as-a-service applications.

The new SSE offering comes alongside two additional security updates announced at the Cisco Live! event today, including Cisco Multicloud Defense for protecting cloud service workloads, plus upgrades to Panoptica, a cloud-native security development platform.

Cisco’s SSE offering is called Cisco Secure Access (pictured), and it features zero-trust network access or ZTNA, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall-as-a-service, DNS security, remote browser isolation and more security capabilities. In a blog post, Jeff Scheaffer, vice president of product management for Cisco’s SSE team, explained that it’s designed to secure any application through any port or protocol, while ensuring optimized performance and continuous verification and granting of trust from a single, cloud-based portal.

SSE services are defined by Gartner Inc. as a comprehensive security service that bundles access control, threat protection, data security, monitoring and acceptable-use control, enforced by network-based and application programming interface-based integration.

Cisco said the Secure Access service will be in limited availability from July, before becoming generally available in October. The platform offers client-based and clientless browser-based access, granular user and application-based access policy control, with Security Assertion Markup Language or SAML authentication, intrusion prevention, built-in identity controls and contextual access controls. Users are authenticated through a secure, encrypted tunnel, meaning they can see only the applications and services they have permission to access, the company said.

“Cisco Secure Access features a new ZTNA Relay architecture that solves the challenges of last-generation ZTNA vendors,” Scheaffer said. “Last generation ZTNA vendors do not support all application architectures, like multi-channel applications, peer-to-peer applications, or server-initiated communication. Last generation ZTNA vendors often struggle with the sheer volume of 1000’s of enterprise and long-tail legacy applications.”

Other capabilities include integrated intelligence from Cisco’s Talos security research organization, ensuring it remains up to date with the latest threats. In addition, Cisco Secure Access continuously runs artificial intelligence and machine learning models against the enormous Talos threat database to provide insights into threats and improve incident response, Scheaffer said. Finally, it’s also integrated with Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence software, so users can identify and resolve any network performance issues that occur.

Cisco is playing to its strengths with Cisco Secure Access, said analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “It is combining its considerable expertise in both networking and security,” he explained. “It adds to the convenience too, because the edge doesn’t operate independently from enterprises’ centralized infrastructure. Cisco has integrated everything in a highly desirable single plane of glass.”

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst John Grady said enterprises have lots of reasons to want to deploy an SSE, with improved security outcomes being at the top of the list. “Achieving this requires an emphasis on users to create a frictionless experience and simplifying security team processes to improve efficiency and ensure consistency,” he said. “Security teams making plans for SSE should prioritize integrated solutions that focus on simplicity, scale and user experience.”

A second new service announced by Cisco today is Multicloud Defense (below) and it’s available now. It is designed to help customer security operations teams get a better handle on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud workloads.

“Cisco Multicloud Defense brings together distributed Layer-7 protection, web application firewall (WAF), and data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities managed through a single, dynamic policy,” Rick Miles, vice president of product management with Cisco’s cloud and network security group, wrote in a blog post.

Miles explained that Multicloud Defense is based on technology Cisco acquired after buying the network security startup Valtix Inc. in February. It acts as a kind of interpreter across multiple cloud platforms, using gateways distributed across customer environments as enforcement points for security policies, he said. In this way, he said, it can stop threats that target specific applications, block command and control attacks, prevent data exfiltration and mitigate lateral movement attacks.

Cisco also rolled out some major updates to Panoptica, which is its primary cloud-native application security software offering. Panoptica allows developers and engineers to embed cloud-native security controls from application development to runtime, using a single interface for container, serverless, API, service mesh and Kubernetes security. It can scale across multiple clusters with an agentless architecture, integrate with developer tools and programming language frameworks across any cloud platform.

Today, Panoptica gains support for Cloud Security Posture Management, enabling continuous cloud security compliance and monitoring at scale. With this, Cisco said, customers gain more visibility into their entire cloud asset inventory, including Kubernetes clusters. There’s also a new attack path engine that uses graph technology to provide advanced attack path analysis, helping security teams to identify and remediate possible risks more quickly.

In addition, Panoptica will be integrated into Cisco’s full-stack observability tools to provide even greater visibility into business risks. The new features will go live later this year, Cisco said.

Finally, Cisco said it’s rolling out a new, high-end firewall appliance. Known as the Secure Firewall 4200 Series, it’s twice as fast as previous systems. It also runs a new operating system that uses AI and machine learning to identify threats within encrypted traffic, without needing to decrypt that traffic first.

In a blog post, Miles said this resolves the complexities involved in decrypting traffic for inspection, which is not only complicated but also affects performance and impacts privacy. The Cisco Secure Firewall 4200 Series appliance will become generally available in September. The new operating system will be available to Cisco’s wider Secure Firewall appliance family in December.

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Cisco integrates generative AI into Webex and security

Cisco recognizes the critical role that generative AI will play in the enterprise context. It is already bringing the technology to Webex and its security solutions.

The number of online applications where AI can be used for free by a large audience is expanding rapidly. In the business context, some fear for their jobs, while others use it as a possibility to take their work to the next level. That there will be an impact is a certainty, according to most. Cisco also concluded this in its 2023 State of Global Innovation study, which is why the company is already introducing it into its solutions.

“Generative AI will quickly become pervasive as we see businesses and workers embrace the technologyto become materially more productive,” stated Jeetu Patel, executive VP and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco.

Generative AI is at the core of AI applications such as DALL-E and ChatGPT. It is an umbrella term for technology that can spit out a variety of data through a prompt. The data can range between videos, audio, 3D models and thus images and text.

Read more: Generative AI: How can GPT-4 shape the corporate world? – Techzine Europe

Generative AI can add a lot of usefulness to an online meeting. Cisco’s Webex will demonstrate this mainly through a digital assistant that can summarize meetings for you.

The addition is very similar to Zoom IQ which was recently introduced. Only at Cisco, there do not seem to be any strict conditions on the user requesting a summary, other than an invitation to the meeting. Zoom gives only the video meeting organizer this right. We think this provides a safer solution for meetings that deal with sensitive company information.

Every Webex user also receives suggestions in chats from a personal digital assistant. To do this, the generative AI gathers information from datasets accessible to the user.

In addition to chat messages, employees can also receive video messages via Vidcast. Watching these can be very time-consuming, so AI will henceforth highlight important points and divide the video into chapters.

Finally, Webex Contact Center is getting a handy addition to make customer service more efficient. AI provides the agent with a clear summarization of issues and resolutions already explored via self-service, so that the customer does not have to explain the problem again to each employee they are connected to.

AI seeps into all parts of an organization, and the technology is also proving beneficial for security. The big news here is the introduction of an AI Policy Assistant in the Cisco Security Cloud. This should take over the job of IT administrators to check and adjust all previous protocols when implementing a new security rule.

Cisco’s security operations center (SOC) also gets an assistant. This helps security teams act quickly when a potential threat is identified. This is done by providing the necessary background to respond rapidly, correlating information about the Cisco Security Cloud platform solution, and recommending possible actions.

The new features discussed will debut by the end of this year. Through the first half of 2024, Cisco will continue to add new features to SOC Assistant.

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