Big Refresh For Cisco's 'Self-Defending' Network

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Networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) is giving its four-year-old self-defending network initiative a major refresh this week at the big RSA security conference in San Francisco. The refresh
touches multiple product lines within Cisco and includes update to Cisco
Security Manager 3.2, Cisco Security Agent 6.0, Cisco Intrusion Prevention
System 6.1, Cisco Security Monitoring Analysis Response System (MARS) 6.0,
as well as new Web filtering and application firewall technologies.

The refresh is one of the largest in Cisco’s self-defending network products
initiative since last year when Cisco updated a
similar set of technologies. The overall goal is to position Cisco as an
end to end integrated security platform that continues to evolve to take on
new security threats and business competitors.

“Each one of those individual product offerings has a suite of services but
there is a natural interconnect in the area of threat identification and
control,” Cisco product manager Tom Russell told InternetNews.com.
“It’s about being able to have endpoint technology share threat information
with IPS devices to be able alter their security posture and being able to
have MARS do the real time correlation across threat identification elements
and inform the rest of the devices. That’s a real natural and it’s a unique
value proposition.”

In terms of the individual products getting updated, Cisco Security Agent
6.0, which is a server and desktop endpoint protection technology, will now
include integrated antivirus and data loss prevention services. Cisco IPS
(define) 6.1 gets a boost with added usability features. Specifically, IPS 6.1 will include something called IPS Manager Express for SMB, which is intended to make IPS easier to use for small-to-midsize organizations.

“Overall we’re seeing growth in IPS, but the key challenge is how do you make IPS more usable to the mass market?” Russell asked rhetorically. He said Cisco’s answer is to “offer tools, techniques and reporting that a broader population would be able to leverage.”

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