SecureX and Webex feature at Cisco Live!

The wider availability of SecureX and a range of new features for Webex were amongst the highlights at the recent Cisco Live! event.

The Covid-19 pandemic meant that this year’s Cisco Live! was held remotely for the first time in its 31-year history, attracting over 100,000 customers, partners and members of the public. The virtual event featured a blend of pre-recorded content, live keynotes and panels, a digital newsroom and video library. Here’s a quick look at some of the main highlights and announcements.

SecureX

SecureX is Cisco’s cloud-native cybersecurity platform and is now generally available globally. It will be included with all Cisco Security products to simplify and enhance the way customers manage security.

The intention is that it will connect the breadth of Cisco’s integrated security portfolio with customers’ entire security infrastructure and so provide a consistent and simplified experience. The benefits include unified visibility, greater automation and strengthened security across network, endpoints, cloud and applications. 

From a visibility point of view, users within SecureX can directly see all of the possible security threats within their network. By clicking on a threat, the system generates a relationship graph so that a user can view everything happening with that incident, with the ability to then simply and quickly block it across the enterprise. 

Automation-wise, SecureX enables users to automate workflows across products from Cisco Security and third parties so they can focus on more impactful tasks. 

The security is strengthened by SecureX threat response that enables security professionals to quickly identify impacted targets and remediate within minutes by correlating intelligence data from multiple intelligence sources and telemetry from network, endpoint, email, cloud and third-party products.

Webex

With so many people now working from home, video and web conferencing use has skyrocketed. By April, Cisco was handling more than 25 billion meeting minutes, which is three times the size of the normal monthly average.  

It was timely, therefore, for Cisco to reveal a number of new features for Webex. These included the addition of Webex Assistant, a personal digital assistant that can be used within the Webex platform. Users can ask the tool to record the meeting, take notes, highlight comments or action points and distribute these to participants after the meeting.

Another new feature is Webex Desk Pro, an artificial intelligent (AI) collaboration device that features a 27-inch 4K display, a 71-degree HD camera and digital whiteboarding, all designed to make remote working simpler. 

Webex is also building up integrations to other popular digital teamwork tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams and a number of work management platforms.

Enhanced resilience

Cisco Live! also saw the launch of a new portfolio of solutions focused on business resiliency.

The business resiliency portfolio offers a number of industry solutions, including healthcare and education. On the educational front, distance learning is a key focus, with secure collaboration technology and expertise to keep the 1.2 billion children and young people currently learning outside of their usual environment, connected and learning worldwide.

There are also a number of secure remote workforce features that are now available as packaged solutions. These include:

• Remote contact centre - technology and deployment services that enable contact centre agents to work from home, using either cloud solutions or providing secure remote access to their existing on-premise technology
• Flexible remote access – expertise and technology to enable employees to access the network, collaboration endpoints and business applications 

In addition, a new Remote Office Connectivity solution was unveiled, providing the ability to extend a corporate network to adjacent and remote locations and meet user demands for more bandwidth, faster connectivity and higher security. 

Intent-based networking

Finally, Cisco added new capabilities across its intent-based networking portfolio, focusing on simplifying automation and providing IT and business insights. 

New automation innovations include Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela,  which now offers complete cloud-native security through the integration with Cisco Umbrella to deliver protection to enterprises against major web attacks arising from SaaS and internet access.  Other new SD-WAN innovations include support for multicast and integrated voice and unified communications. 

In addition, Cisco is expanding insights to previously unmonitored devices, providing IT functions with the ability to drive more efficient network segmentation and better manage IoT devices. New features include: 

• AI Endpoint Analytics, through which Cisco DNA Center will identify previously unknown endpoints at scale, then use various contextual sources and artificial intelligence to logically group them. With this information, IT can create the basis for scalable, automated policies
• Group-based policy analytics, allowing Cisco DNA Center to analyse traffic flows between groups of endpoints in order to design policies that can be used as the basis for proper segmentation

Cisco continue to lead the way on solutions for the business of the future, virtually every solution we see - whether it be an upgrade or brown field deployment - is focused around the programmability of the network and the Cisco Digital Network Architecture. CoVID-19 has without doubt provided its challenges, but it has also provided significant opportunities for organisations to transform their businesses much quicker than they would have done historically. From a solution perspective, the future is exciting, with training playing a key role in a business adoption of new technologies.