Dive into the future of cybersecurity in the latest episode of Connected, hosted by Diana Blass! Discover how enterprises are moving from siloed solutions to integrated, autonomous tools for enhanced protection in the AI era, and see how the tech market is evolving. We explore the topic through the lens of Cisco, a networking company that’s become increasingly competitive in cybersecurity following its acquisition of Splunk. Hear exclusive interviews with Krista Macomber and Steven Dickens from The Futurum Group, plus top executives from Cisco. Tune in now!
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Transcript:
Diana Blass: Another cyber attack making national headlines.
Speaker 1: A cyber attack on a company that provides software for thousands of car dealers in North America says it’s a “ransom event”.
Speaker 2: Dealerships across the country reverted to using pen and paper to process repairs and vehicle sales this week.
Diana Blass: Unfortunately, it’s a story we’ll see more of.
Jeetu Patel: What adversaries are doing is they’re weaponizing AI in very creative ways.
Chuck Robbins: And if you can’t take those data points and correlate them as fast as possible, then you’re going to be at a significant disadvantage from the threat actors around the world.
Diana Blass: Stakes are high and pressure is on. How can enterprises withstand the storm?
Steven Dickens: How do you ensure your estate is up-to-date? How do you ensure that you’ve got patches deployed in the right place? How do you ensure that you’re not moving against a policy that you’ve set?
Krista Macomber: I talk to practitioners, and commonly they’re using dozens of security tools.
Diana Blass: But are they tools fit for an AI fight?
Jeetu Patel: Security is largely a data problem.
Diana Blass: The problem is clear, so what’s the solution? The cybersecurity market is booming. There are over 3,500 vendors in this space, each with their own cutting edge tools, yet the attacks continue to rise.
Krista Macomber: It is cumbersome and complex to manage, and it’s kind of hindering their ability to respond and keep pace with how quickly the threat landscape is evolving at the same time.
Diana Blass: That’s why the industry is turning to unified security solutions. According to Forrester, companies that use integrated security platforms experience a 50% reduction in the time to detect and respond to threats, compared to those using siloed solutions. Enterprises need to think like a hacker, something F1’s McLaren Racing is doing with Cisco Security using AI to its advantage. In May, Cisco became the official security partner for the F1 McLaren Racing team. The team uses solutions like the Cisco Secure Firewall, which gives it end-to-end visibility and enables it to deploy network segmentation. Plus, Cisco XDR helps McLaren to investigate and remediate high priority incidents. Together, these solutions require high quality data to provide digital resilience, something that’ll likely get a boost to Cisco’s $28 billion acquisition, Splunk.
Steven Dickens: This is the biggest acquisition of a software company they’ve made. Arguably, you could go back and say those previous acquisitions haven’t really dented the trajectory of Cisco. This one absolutely will.
Krista Macomber: So, I’m going to say that Splunk is going to play a very big role in a couple of areas, and the first is really the ability to have that full stack observability. I did see an announcement from Cisco that actually AppDynamics, which does not only the app performance management for Cisco, but also it is sort of their software platform for IT operations analytics, my understanding is that’s going to be folded in as a part of Splunk. Another area that I’m really interested to see is the integration of Cisco services with Splunk data, like maybe kind of threat visibility and even leaning a little bit into incident response as well.
Diana Blass: It’s an acquisition that highlights an enterprise’s need for visibility across all areas of the network and applications.
Jonathan Davidson: If you can see and understand everything, then all of you, you get to fix anything.
Diana Blass: It’s why the observability market is on fire right now, and Cisco is in a unique position to benefit from that.
Krista Macomber: Cisco already has this position as sort of being that networking glue.
Diana Blass: This means that Cisco can seamlessly integrate its security solutions into a customer’s environment, deploying solutions like its Cisco Hypershield, its newest capability.
Jeetu Patel: This is the most consequential innovation we have done in 40 years in the history of Cisco in cybersecurity.
Diana Blass: This solution embeds security controls into servers and the network fabric, putting detection closer to the workloads that need to be protected.
Krista Macomber: Really, it’s sort of built from the ground up to be a new architecture that integrates AI for security. So, there are two kind of key use cases that Cisco talked about when it introduced Hypershield, and those are the ability to automatically apply microsegmentation in the network. And then the second use case that I talked about was, what it calls sort of distributed protection. So, understanding if there’s a portion of the environment that is maybe out of date and needs to be updated, and that’s substantial because keeping all of the various components of the network infrastructure up to date has been just notoriously very difficult.
Diana Blass: It all speaks as Cisco’s strategy to build an all encompassing security platform. And with Splunk, Cisco has a unique opportunity to eliminate a lot of the security complexities that enterprises are facing, but here’s a challenge.
Steven Dickens: That’s shown a good story. I think on paper what they’re doing looks really good. We now need to see feature function, rich integration. Just keep executing, keep executing. It’s all about execution for the next 12 months.
Diana Blass: Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. The AI market is poised for significant growth, with IDC predicting it will reach $500 billion by 2024. Hackers will get smarter. Will enterprises do the same?
Author Information
Diana Blass is a journalist with a background in technology news and analysis. Her work has appeared on Fox Television Stations, The Discovery Channel, CRN, Light Reading, and other Informa-owned media brands. In addition to her work at The Six Five, she manages Diana Blass Productions, where she develops and produces digital documentaries, podcasts, and commercials for media and corporate brands.
