Security has been a big area of focus for Cisco this year. In
February last year, Cisco CEO John Chambers announced that security
was to become a top engineering priority for the company. The pace
of innovation and development has been rapid ever since. To
understand Cisco’s focus on security, InformationWeek’s
Srikanth RP caught up with Chris Young, Senior VP Security, who
shares with us his perspective on why context-aware security is key
for thwarting new age threats
How do you think the threat landscape has
changed?
From a strategic point of view, mobility driven by trends such as
BYOD is reshaping what is happening at the endpoint. This is
fundamentally because what you are doing at the endpoint is going
to change because of BYOD. The cloud has brought in a different
dimension. We have seen instances where hackers have used the cloud
as a platform to stage DDoS attacks. These are some of the biggest
trends that are changing the security landscape today.
How do you think the industry must respond
to thwart these threats?
The ideal way is to build comprehensive security in all solutions,
and make security as integrated as possible. And the best way to do
this is build security into the network itself as the network knows
everything that is happening in the environment. Using the
intelligence in the network, we can not only have clear visibility
into what computer or mobile users are doing on the network, we can
also enforce granular policies for giving access to social
applications such as Facebook. When you see applications,
information, the devices and the users on the network, you have a
context – and using this context, you can decide your
security posture.
Do you think context-aware security can
prevent sophisticated attacks such as APTs?
If we are able to understand what is happening from the endpoint to
the datacenter and at the application level, and have visibility
into identity and the type of devices that are connecting to a
network – we can certainly mitigate sophisticated attacks by
looking at the big picture. For example, if you suddenly see a
computer trying to connect itself to different types of servers at
an odd time of the day, you must certainly introspect. Enterprises,
hence need to be contextually aware of who, what, when and how is a
service or user trying to connect to an application or network. For
attacks such as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), which are slow,
patient and often below the radar, context-aware security can go a
long way in boosting our defense mechanism, and offer the best
defense against APTs. As the network plays a vital role in
establishing context, intelligence and control, it is best equipped
to understand what is happening in your environment.
About Author
An award-winning journalist with more than 14 years of experience, Srikanth RP is Executive Editor with InformationWeek India. Srikanth is passionate about writing on topics which clearly show the business impact of technology.
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