Addressing the participants of RSA Conference, an annual gathering of cybersecurity professional, Cisco’s Chuck Robbins tells organizations to look into their security postures, which should be “simple, intelligent, and everywhere.”

The risks of the new working arrangements cannot be stressed enough with employees working on unsecured networks and internet connectivity. Earlier reports from various cybersecurity firms have emphasized the surge in cyber attacks as cybercriminals saw an entry point in individual users’ connections and vulnerability.

“Security has to be at the heart of everything in the new world we live in. We believe it needs to be done with a platform approach that is simple, comprehensive, and based on intelligence,” said Robbins, chair and CEO, Cisco. “There is really no perimeter in the enterprise to defend anymore. We need visibility across endpoints, users, and applications as well as securing critical control points with continuous passwordless authentication.”

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Cisco sees organizations transitioning to become cloud-first and digital-first, and cybersecurity will be increasingly complex as the organization’s real estate of networks, devices and endpoints expand.

“The attack surface has grown exponentially with the expansion of remote workers, home networks & unsecured devices, and applications or workloads have become the new attack vector,” said Karrie Ilagan, managing director for Cisco Philippines. “Businesses must create a flexible, safe, and secure hybrid work environment with employees moving on and off the network with similar levels of protection.”

End-to-end security

At RSA, Cisco unveiled its innovations addressing the most pressing security issues and promise to deliver end-to-end security, across users, devices, networks, applications, and data.

Cisco said that these new solutions improve Extended Detection and Response (XDR) with greater visibility across network, endpoint, and cloud. The latest innovations expand Cisco’s vision for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with enhanced threat detection in the cloud and redefine and simplify network security.

In delivering simplified security solutions, Cisco focuses on three key areas.

1. Improving visibility and simplifying Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

Organizations continue to struggle with extending visibility and protection to endpoints, with more than 40% globally reporting a major security incident in the last two years, according to the new “Cisco Security Outcomes Study: Endpoint Edition.” Organizations that do not prioritize integrated solutions were almost twice as likely to have suffered a major security event. In response, Cisco continues to expand its XDR capabilities, integrating multiple security control points and applying analytics and automation to reduce customers’ time to detection and response

“Organizations are increasingly looking to adopt end-to-end security architectures to support this new way of working, and we think it’s critical to take a platform approach to simplify security, network, and IT operations as customers embark on digital transformation,” said Gee Rittenhouse, SVP and GM, Cisco Secure. “Since it was launched last year at RSA, more than 7,000 customers are using Cisco’s SecureX platform to unlock value from existing security solutions and accelerate their migration to XDR.”

2. Delivering on a SASE Vision with Enhanced Cloud Security

Today’s distributed and hybrid workforce necessitates delivering protection and performance wherever employees access the internet or cloud applications. Cisco’s SASE architecture integrates multiple security and networking functions into a single, secure connectivity offer. This significantly simplifies security and reduces the cost, time, and resources previously required for deployment, configuration, and integration.

3. Redefining and Simplifying Network Security

Constantly changing application environments make network security more complex. Modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) applications necessitate tighter coordination among developers, security, and network teams to ensure application environments and workloads are secure, firewalls are appropriately configured, and policies are integrated. Otherwise, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in these constantly changing environments leave doors open for potential threat actors.

“Today, our Security portfolio is integrated across all critical control points for the network, users and endpoints, cloud edge, and applications,” said Ilagan. “It is now cloud-managed with the best-in-class SecureX platform for Cisco and third-party solutions.”

Cisco said its end-to-end security is one of Cisco’s key strategic pillars in helping customers connect, secure, and automate in a cloud-first world to strengthen their digital resilience and accelerate their digital agility.

“When it comes to security, it’s the technology that has to work harder, not the people who use it,” Ilagan sai.