Made-for-Midmarket Cybersecurity

Midsize organizations face the same cybersecurity challenges as their larger counterparts and require the same robust security solutions to protect their customer and employee data. Unfortunately, they typically face even greater restraints when it comes to resources, budgets, and IT staff.

Organizations cannot afford to leave gaps in protection because sophisticated attackers will exploit any gap, regardless how small. At the same time, adding complexity and gaps with disparate security solutions that are not integrated will not deliver the level of protection required against advanced threats.

To deal with their biggest challenges, midsize companies need a simple and scalable threat-centric security model, meaning focused on the threats themselves in addition to defining policy or controls. This model also needs to be holistic in nature to address security across the full attack continuum—before, during, and after an attack—and across the ever-expanding number of attack vectors.

As a security professional at a midsize organization, you need to consider solutions that offer the following capabilities:

Before an Attack

You need to know what is on your network in order to defend it: devices, operating systems, services, applications, users, content, and potential vulnerabilities. You also need to implement access controls, enforce policy, and block applications and overall access to assets. Minimizing the attack surface through intelligent and granular controls reduces your organization’s vulnerability to attackers taking advantage of today’s many attack vectors to glean information and penetrate networks.

Before an attack, the Cisco ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewall provides security teams at midsize organizations with:

• Granular access controls and policies.
• Visibility and granular control of applications and microapplications, with behavior-based controls.
• In addition, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) automates and simplifies secure access control for wired, wireless, or VPN connectivity to help organizations enforce compliance and enhance infrastructure security.

In addition, Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) automates and simplifies secure access control for wired, wireless, or VPN connectivity to help organizations enforce compliance and enhance infrastructure security.

However, policy and controls alone are no longer enough. Attackers do not discriminate. The more advanced attackers can still find and exploit vulnerabilities to achieve their objective.

During an Attack

With today's threat landscape full of advanced malware and zero-day attacks, point-in-time technologies alone do not work. You need the best threat detection possible to continuously identify malicious activity. After you detect an attack, we can block it and defend the environment.

During an attack, the Cisco Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and Content Security portfolio of products can help defend against attacks targeting gateways:

• Cisco IPS offers comprehensive, highly effective advanced threat protection.
• Cisco Email and Web Security appliances detect and block evolving email and web threats. 
• Cisco Cloud Web Security provides industry-leading security and control for the distributed enterprise.

Also during an attack, Cisco TrustSec, embedded in switches, routers and security devices, can help quarantine malicious traffic across the entire network. It can segment traffic and prevent unauthorized access during an outbreak giving administrators time to identify and remediate threats.

Still, given the nature of malware today, the best threat detection alone is not sufficient to protect your environment.

After an Attack

Invariably some attacks will be successful. You need to be able to determine the scope of the damage, contain the event, remediate, and bring operations back to normal. You also need to address a broad range of attack vectors, with solutions that operate everywhere the threat can manifest itself: on the network, endpoint, mobile devices, and virtual environments.

After an attack, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) helps midsize companies:

• Discover, analyze, investigate, block, and remediate advanced malware outbreaks and advanced persistent threats (APTs) across an ever-expanding number of attack vectors
• Speed response times and automate remediation to prevent future attacks, mitigate damage, and eliminate the risk of reinfection
• Visualize and specifically determine malware effects and indicators of compromise at the network and system levels while delivering detailed analysis of malware behavior

Midsize organizations are under pressure to deliver differentiated value to their customers in order to stay competitive. The business network architecture is now the catalyst to help make this happen. Unless a holistic security solution is considered, it only adds to the complexity problem, creating security gaps and making it much harder to scale in line with today’s new and changing business models.

We believe you will find the right match for your business with Cisco Midsize Business Solutions. Your security solution made simple; your business made competitive.

Sincerely,
Marc Solomon, Vice President, Security Marketing, Cisco

Marc Solomon, Cisco's VP of Security Marketing, has over 15 years of experience defining and managing software and software-as-a-service platforms for IT Operations and Security. Marc joined Cisco after their acquisition of Sourcefire, where he served as Chief Marketing Officer. During his time at Sourcefire, he led all aspects of the company's global marketing strategies, branding initiatives and programs. In this role, he was also responsible for product roadmap, packaging and positioning. Solomon joined Sourcefire from Fiberlink where he was responsible for the product strategy, roadmap and leadership of Fiberlink's MaaS360 on-demand IT Operations software and managed security services. Prior to Fiberlink, he was Director of Product Management at McAfee, responsible for leading the company's entire consumer product portfolio. Before McAfee, Solomon held various senior roles at Everdream (acquired by Dell), Deloitte Consulting and HP. Solomon has a B.A. in Economics from the University of Maryland, and an MBA from Stanford University.