Time and Again, We Are Reminded That Together Is Better

If the past couple of years has taught us anything, it’s that there is strength in numbers. Cybersecurity professionals know this more than most. Challenges are becoming more complex, telemetry data more voluminous, vulnerabilities more prevalent, workforces and attack surfaces more distributed, and threats more sophisticated.

In the face of all this, few organizations have the resources, expertise or will to go it alone. Nor should they.

As we wrap up another year of devastating exploits and industry milestones, I’m reminded how important it is to have a community of friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers who share your idea of what’s important.

One apt example: Kenna became part of Cisco this year. Cisco’s extensive security portfolio has begun to incorporate the risk-based vulnerability management advances we’ve pioneered for more than a decade. The combination is far greater than the sum of its parts—aimed at creating an integrated environment for hunting down and assessing threats, identifying the vulnerabilities most likely to pose a risk to that organization, and giving remediation teams clear guidance about what to fix first.

This is all to help enterprises address the security challenges they continue to face. And those challenges are bound to be considerable. 

A new path forward forged through shared struggles

The very nature of enterprise security itself can make the job of protecting a business more difficult. The average enterprise maintains 45 different security tools on its networks. SecOps teams are finding the data these tools generate is already expansive and propagating quickly, and is very often hard to reach. But there’s a growing urgency to capture and integrate this ocean of data to help detect security threats as efficiently and effectively as possible. Few companies are immune to this challenge; overcoming data overload to draw meaningful conclusions about their environment is an absolute prerequisite to lowering their overall risk. 

That end goal is too important to compromise, even if the task seems impossible on its face. Luckily for modern enterprises, pervasive problems tend to usher in creative innovation. 

This shared struggle paved the way for XDR (extended detection response), which is fast becoming a primary focus for many security vendors attempting to smooth out security pain points and help customers harness their data. And having recently folded Kenna Security into their organization, Cisco is leading the charge.

Anchoring Cisco’s approach to XDR (and security on the whole) is a mission to make security operations as simple, automated, and democratized as possible. By integrating Kenna’s risk-based vulnerability management technology and advanced data science with Cisco’s robust threat management solutions, Cisco is removing hurdles and layering in enhanced organizational context to help teams focus their finite resources on their most important threats when their remediation will make the greatest impact.

Here’s how that works: Automation helps simplify previously complex processes and tasks, and simplification leads to a more democratized Security environment. From there, organizations can establish a culture of cybersecurity  to unite everyone around risk and engage them in a shared mission to reduce it.

As I say, there’s strength in numbers.

Better together

Simplifying all those tasks isn’t easy; in fact, it’s incredibly hard. It takes multiple experts coming together to ensure each piece works as it should, and to make sense of the ever-growing streams of data that every enterprise needs to analyze to predict the next exploit. And it takes a commitment to do exactly what we’re working on now: democratizing security by extending it beyond a few key roles to stakeholders throughout the organization, and to help enterprises adopt a company-wide culture focused on reducing risk.

It’s only through our ongoing collaboration with customers, partners, and our colleagues at Cisco that we’re able to provide that kind of comprehensive, next-level protection, and to keep innovating our offerings to remain a step ahead of the bad actors who work 24 hours a day to foil your defenses. 

Thanks for being part of our community

The world can be a harsh place indeed. One approach is to face it alone, to figure out everything yourself, and suffer the slings and arrows of increasingly outrageous fortune by yourself. But throughout these disruptive times, and as we move forward into an uncertain future, one thing seems clear: Together is better.

To our customers, partners, and team members around the world: Thanks for being part of our community, and for taking this journey together with us. We’re stronger for knowing you. And we’ll continue working hard so you’ll always feel the same.