Cisco's SecureX Claims Context-Aware Security

Cisco's competitors have gained ground on the network giant recently, yet the company has a new solution to keep the momentum in its favor. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

Cisco is rolling out a new security framework this week at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. The new framework, called SecureX, goes beyond the self-defending network architecture that Cisco has pushed at RSA in years past with additional context aware network intelligence.

As part of the SecureX launch, Cisco is delivering new features for its ASA firewall hardware as well as improvements to the AnyConnect mobile VPN client. The overall goal of SecureX is to make networks more aware of policy and threats, no matter where the threats or the endpoint reside.

"SecureX is about making security more distributed and ingrained in the network fabric and bringing in context-aware scanning," Kevin Kennedy, product line manager at Cisco, told InternetNews.com.

Kennedy noted that SecureX is a response to changes in the market for how security needs to be implemented. He said that cloud, virtualization and mobility deployments have changed the nature of technology usage as well as the associated risks and threats. Instead of thinking about network security in terms of IP addresses and ports, Kennedy said that the language of security needs to change. In other words, security policies need to correlate more closely with business rules and definitions.

Read the rest about Cisco's SecureX at eSecurityPlanet.