Cisco Delivers New Wave of Security Solutions

Cisco has introduced a set of security solutions designed to protect data centers in Nigeria against threats they face in moving towards more consolidated and virtualized environments, while also enabling businesses to take advantage of new cloud-based models.

Collectively, the new offerings extend data center and security professionals’ power to enforce end-to-end security for high-capacity data centers and mobile workforces.
 
The offerings which include new highly scalable software for the world’s most widely deployed firewall, the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) line; virtualized ASA for multi-tenant environments; data center-grade intrusion prevention system (IPS); as well as new improvements to the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client to meet the stringent requirements of a more mobile and productive workforce.

The virtualization and cloud mega trend is forcing profound shifts within data centers, affecting everything from IT services to business models to architectures. According to a recent Cisco reports, nearly 3000% increase in application traffic and network connections per second by 2015, more than 50% of workloads in the data center will be virtualized by 2013 and an average of 3 X mobile devices are used on enterprise networks by employees.

Said Rechchad, acting general manager for Cisco Nigeria said: “For enterprises to confidently seize the business benefits offered by data center virtualization and the cloud, security must be seen as the art of the possible, not as a hindrance. As with the rest of your network, we make consistent security a deployment decision that enables policies to work throughout hybrid environments - physical, virtual and cloud - and enables data center professionals to securely deliver IT-as-a-Service without impeding network performance.”

With this announcement, Cisco is helping security to keep pace with the demands of changing high-performance virtual and cloud environments, as well as the demands of increased complexity, compliance and employees bringing their own devices to work, among other trends. 

Data centers now have the necessary security requirements such as the ability to scale to meet seemingly insatiable performance requirements, while ensuring the highest levels of security, can work consistently across hybrid environments and also focus on maintaining business/IT alignment and avoid chokepoints that can degrade performance.

Operating under the principle that security must be integrated across the network to ensure protection of unified data centers, Cisco believes network policies must be unified across physical and virtual worlds, intra-virtual machine communication should be secured, and access to applications be wired and mobile clients must be protected.