The Lippis Report

May 4th, 2009

By Cisco Systems

This short three page At-A-Glance paper provides a quick description of Cisco Security Intelligence Operations. Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) is an advanced security i

May 4th, 2009

By Cisco Systems

Innovations such as virtualization, cloud computing, and web-based access for employees, partners, and customers are bringing about a dramatic evolution in nearly every organization’s infrastructure. Many organizations are also transitioning from physical-based collaboration processes to collaborating across geographies by building distributed networks to gain a time-to-market advantage. Web 2.0 technologies, mobility, social networking and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are creating new ways to work and collaborate, and to reach out to customers and partners.

From a security standpoint, these changes have brought with them new and complex challenges. Traditional point security tools are limited in their ability to support and secure this business transformation, either leaving critical new resources unprotected or preventing the deployment of new services as they do not secure new processes and protocols. At the same time, organizations are facing a host of new threats that target many of these new services and impact network and service availability.

Find out how to protect your organization without restricting use of new productive IT solutions by downloading this paper.

May 4th, 2009

By Nick Lippis, Lippis Consulting

Along with a turbulent macroeconomic cycle comes business rationalization and in networking the wide area offers a unique opportunity to deliver value, both in terms of operational efficiency and business initiative alignment. Advances in network-embedded, software-based WAN Services such as security, unified communications (UC) and WAN optimization are starting to deliver the same type of application experience and management tools to control application performance that was once only available over the LAN. But the wide area network has been pieced together, usually site by site, without a comprehensive plan. This lack of planning is most acute in branch-office-to-WAN and data center connections as geographically distributed branches are connected with inconsistent WAN Services and indigenous WAN transport. IT planners are being offered an opportunity to implement a common set of WAN Services embedded within routers such as UC, WAN optimization, security etc., between branch, headquarter and data center sites which promises to lower operational spend, align business initiatives and policy while delivering Local Area Networks (LANs) -like application performance. This paper presents a strategy for common WAN Services embedded in routers connecting branch offices to data centers and larger corporate sites that speed up workflow and business process for all employees independent of geographic location.

Learn about WAN Advantage by downloading this white paper.

May 4th, 2009

Today’s collaborative infrastructure and evolving security landscape brings an abundance of risk. Newly adopted IT tools and services, often untried and vulnerable, allow cybercriminals to exploit them to sabotage or gain financially. The newest wave of threats such as Conficker, McColo, Srizbi etc often target personal data propagating via multiple blended vehicles such as web, email, and USB keys to bypass legacy security tools. Even strong security technologies are often unable to keep up with today’s attacks: they are too nimble, specialized, and targeted. Cisco’s new Security Intelligence Operations or SIO offering identifies threats in real time via global correlation so that businesses can be more secure in their IT defenses. Ambika Gadre, Director Product Marketing in the Cisco Security Technology Business Unit discusses SIO, reputation scoring, global correlation and a powerful approach to mitigating blended exploits from infecting your corporation.

May 4th, 2009

Marlowe Fenne, Cisco Systems Solutions Marketing Manager in the Network Systems group, joins me to talk about the IT Innovations forum and Cisco’s spring announcements. We discuss the business results of exploiting WAN Advantage, Webex Node, Virtual Connect, Security, Unified Communications, AXP, Switching, H1N1’s reminder of the importance of telecommuting and much more. Marlowe also provides a sneak preview of the May 7th IT Innovations Forum at which I present and you can attend for free at http://www.ciscoitinnovationsforum.com.