Dive Brief:

• On Monday, Cisco unveiled six new services and cloud-based security solutions constructed with security in mind, particularly at the points of connection that users traverse on a network.
• Among the new offerings, Cisco announced Defense Orchestrator, a cloud-based management application, which works to help manage the security infrastructure and policies of devices in different locations, better managing network security policies.  
• Another product, Umbrella Roaming, eliminates blind spots outside of a network, ensuring security for "roaming employees," according to the announcement.

Dive Insight:

Included in the product announcements was Umbrella Branch, which allows for increased control of guest Wi-Fi use; Meraki MX Security Appliances with Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and Threat Grid, a unified threat management solution; Stealthwatch Learning Networks License, which allows Cisco’s Integrated Services Routers to act as a security sensor and enforce branch threat protection; and Security Services for Digital Transformation, a service to examine an organization’s security fundamentals to find if they are ready to adopt other digital technologies.

Companies across sectors are looking for new, more efficient ways to address security. In the past, security was considered an afterthought, but now it is becoming a functionality that companies can hinge their products on. For example, when considering cloud vendors, many companies base their decisions on both security and reliability.

With its announcement, Cisco is working to help bridge the "security effectiveness gap." Rather than a solution for every disparate security need in the enterprise, the company is baking security into its network and IT management portfolio, which would ideally work to simplify enterprise security.

Cisco is now at a point "where we're able to start bringing two products together and gain more than the sum of their parts by offering a new outcome to our customers because of that," said Ben Munroe, Security Product Marketing Manager, Cisco Security Business Group, in an interview with CIO Dive.

"There's this really rich opportunity for companies to transform," Munroe said. "In doing so, we want to make sure that security is considered at the foundation level that they think about how this new architecture is going to work. Security needs to be imbedded in that. It needs to start with their architecture, start with their network, as opposed to being an add-on service at the end, or something that is an afterthought."