Analyze all the security and AI news from Cisco Live EMEA 2024

As usual, Cisco Systems Corporationannual event user conference, Cisco Live EMEA The Amsterdam-based network serves as a platform for networking giants to release the latest innovations in many of their product lines.

Although this event is much smaller than Cisco Live in the US, it is important to the company because Europe, the Middle East, and Africa is a highly diverse region spanning 120 countries. The region has a new leader for this year's event, Oliver Tuzik. He previously ran Cisco's partner organization and is currently responsible for the EMEA region. At a pre-press conference, Tuzik said the theme for the 2024 event is “Let's Go,” which means “don't wait or stop because the opportunity is there.”

All new products and services announced were designed to help customers 'go on the go'. For me, the key item was security innovation. There are several reasons for this.

First, over the past 18 months, Cisco has completely restructured its security business under the leadership of Jeetu Patel and Tom Gillis. What was once a hodgepodge of products is now offered as three suites: user, cloud, and breach protection from Security Cloud, which takes data from Cisco's firewall business.

The second reason why the news at Cisco Live EMEA is so important is that security is the single biggest transformational opportunity for the company. The market is large and highly fragmented, so even mediocre execution can have a significant impact on revenue and profitability.

The most notable security announcement was the release of Cisco Identity Intelligence, which helps businesses combat hackers who misuse identities. During the briefing, Matt Caulfield, vice president of identity security product management, featured a slide asking, “Why hack when you can just log in?” This refers to the increasing number of breaches that involve stealing user credentials.

As phishing becomes more sophisticated, more users are giving up their identities. This can be difficult to understand because there is a diverse ecosystem of identity systems, without a complete picture, and without excessive privileges that give many users access to everything.

Cisco Identity Intelligence understands the identity “attack surface.” We accomplish this through an ecosystem play that integrates with all major identity providers, including Okta Inc., Microsoft Corp., Zscaler Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and others, as well as Cisco ISE.

Using that information, Cisco Identity Intelligence can discover users, connected machines, applications, services, and the relationships between them. More importantly, it allows Cisco to differentiate between their behavior, interactions, and which users are accessing which applications from which networks. This allows Cisco to limit users' access to only the resources they need to access.

Cisco AI Assistant for Secure Access was also announced. The idea here is that through natural language, security administrators can simplify the process of creating rules and policies. For example, if a security engineer tells the assistant to “deny access to all gambling sites and call the rule 'No Access to Gambling,'” the AI ​​assistant will handle the technical details. This greatly speeds up policy management and eliminates human error.

Another security-related product is the new Secure Access: Experience Insights. Cisco uses this to make inferences about user experience. thousand eyes data. The industry trend is for digital experience monitoring to become part of the security stack. While other security vendors have deployed experience monitoring tools, ThousandEyes gives Cisco a unique advantage in monitoring Internet-based traffic and can complement on-net information.

Expanding the reach of ThousandEyes is what our customers and partners are asking for. I asked Vice President Joe Berger last year. global technology’s digital experience practices and what they expect from Cisco. “More ThousandEyes in more places,” he said, so it's good to see Cisco introduce ThousandEyes to its security portfolio.

A final highlight in security news is multi-cloud defense, which simplifies security deployment across different cloud environments. The technically accurate name was “Hybrid Multicloud Defense.” The service enables security professionals to create a single policy that spans private clouds and public cloud services such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Outside of security, Cisco is deeply committed to artificial intelligence infrastructure. At the event, the company announced a new Cisco Validated Design (CVD), a blueprint for deploying infrastructure to support AI deployments. Data center infrastructures are becoming increasingly fragmented, making it extremely difficult to keep all components operating optimally. CVD is designed to provide customers with a turnkey blueprint to successfully deploy their technology, eliminating months of tweaking and tuning.

Cisco and Nvidia Corp. are also expanding their partnership on integrated products that combine software and networking hardware to help customers quickly deploy the right infrastructure for AI applications. This partnership leverages Ethernet networking and provides customers with an alternative to her Infiniband. There is a heated debate in the industry about Infiniband and Ethernet, both of which play important roles in AI. The partnership with Cisco gives Nvidia customers access to both.

This was a powerful series of announcements for Cisco as it simplifies the biggest pain points for information technology organizations: AI and security. For a company of Cisco's size, it has demonstrated a high level of agility in shifting its strategy. Splunk is coming, and I can't speak to that, but I expect that acquisition to impact almost every part of Cisco's business.

Zeus Kerravala is a Principal Analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article on his SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Cisco