Cisco offers new cybersecurity guidance and solution

Cisco has announced important new guidance for cybersecurity professionals, together with an exciting collaborative offering that will add powerful capabilities to the SecureX portfolio.

On the research front, a new Cisco study has identified the most effective measures businesses can take to defend themselves against the raft of emerging cyber threats.

Following on from the initial Security Outcomes Study undertaken in 2020, Cisco has released a follow-up Volume 2 that builds upon the original findings.

The earlier study revealed the five practices the most significantly influenced the success (or otherwise!) of a cybersecurity programme. These were:

• Proactively refreshing technology – it is important that an organisation stays up-to-date with the best available IT and security technologies
• Integrating technology effectively - security technologies should be well-integrated and work effectively together
• Undertaking timely incident response – these capabilities should ensure the timely and effective investigation and remediation of security events
• Detecting threats accurately - threat detection capabilities must provide accurate awareness of potential security events without any significant blind spots
• Enabling prompt disaster recovery - the recovery capabilities should minimise impact and ensure resilience of business functions affected by security incidents

This latest study, which surveyed more than 5,100 security and privacy professionals across 27 markets, analysed those top five practices more closely in order to identify the key success factors. Let’s take a look at highlights from these findings.

Update and integrate architecture - modern, well-integrated IT utilising cloud-based architectures contribute to overall programme success more than any other security practice or control. Furthermore, organisations that integrate their security technologies successfully are seven times more likely to achieve high levels of process automation.

Detect and respond to cyber threats - cybersecurity programmes built on strong people, processes and technology perform over three times more effectively than those with weaker resources. Revealingly, even though outsourced detection and response teams are perceived to be superior, the reality is that internal teams actually demonstrate a faster meantime-to-respond (6 days vs. 13 days).

Stay resilient when disaster strikes - organisations with board-level oversight of business continuity and disaster recovery are the most likely (11% above average) to report having strong programmes, whilst those that regularly test their business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities in multiple ways are 2.5 times more likely to maintain business resilience.

New collaboration with JupiterOne

The importance of utilising up-to-date cloud-based architectures and effective integration, as mentioned above, is clearly evidenced in a new cloud security and security operations partnership between Cisco and JupiterOne aimed at providing customers with greater visibility into all of their cyber assets and assisting in the identification of security and compliance gaps.

Labelled ‘Cisco Secure Cloud Insights with JupiterOne’, the new offering will bring fresh and powerful capabilities to Cisco’s SecureX family of products. These include comprehensive public cloud inventory and insights, relationship mapping to navigate cloud-based entities and access rights, and security compliance reporting.

Secure Cloud Insights does this by providing customers with a knowledge graph of consolidated metadata that highlights configurations, access policies, settings, tags and rules that govern interaction between entities. This data is collected from around 50 predefined integrations that include public cloud environments, vulnerability scanners, endpoint protection and network security tools, and development and code repositories.

Customer queries are made easier through the availability of 550 pre-built queries and the option to create bespoke queries.

Al Huger, Senior Vice President & General Manager at Cisco outlined the potential benefits that this new partnership can bring, saying ““This new offering extends beyond traditional cloud security posture management and will enable Cisco’s security customers to effectively manage risk and reduce the attack surface of their cloud-native processes and applications”.