Cisco updates its SASE service and announces improvements in cloud security

Cisco has taken advantage of RSA Security Conference to announce a upgrade your SASE service (Secure Access Service Edge), plus a new, simpler security control at the edge. It has also announced the plans they have to move the security operation in companies to the cloud.

The centerpiece of all Cisco announcements has been a global security platform Cisco Security Cloud. It will include unified management and policies, as well as offering open APIs to help extend a security ecosystem that also includes third parties.

For Cisco, this platform is «a strategic, multi-year vision for the future of security«. It is therefore not a closed product or service, but rather part of a roadmap that began a few years ago, and that Cisco will continue to develop based on the main principles of its idea, on which it has drawn a roadmap for the future. Thus, this security cloud will be created from products that already exist, such as Umbrella, and with offers from Duo. But other functions that it will have will be developed in the future.

Few details of that roadmap are yet known, although Cisco has stated its design goal for the Security Cloud: to develop it horizontally, as a layer that goes on top of the infrastructure and covers all of a customer’s cloud services. Of them, the main ones are Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. In addition, these will probably have some kind of private data center, with the aim of protecting all the main applications.

The goal of Security Cloud, therefore, seems to be that there is no lockdown or lockdown around a particular environment. That is, it will not be native or exclusive to any cloud service or private data center. Instead, the security function would take precedence over what it protects, operating in a hybrid multi-cloud environment.

But it is not the only objective that Cisco pursues with the platform, since it also wants to simplify the security experience for end users. It does this by bringing together Cisco authentication, threat prevention, threat detection, response, and remediation into a single point. In this way, they can also work so that networks, policies and other security services are offered from the cloud.

As for the new SASE service announced, it is already available and will be offered by subscription. Cisco+ Secure Connect Now, as it is called, features Cisco Meraki SD-WAN technology, which includes integrated branch connectivity, as well as security, management, orchestration, and automation support features. All this can be managed through a single control panel.