I just got back from CiscoLive 2017 in Las Vegas and have started my own blog, with this being my inaugural post. I am not new to CiscoLive as this was my 6th major Cisco event in the last 7 years (I skipped San Francisco). Yes – I am an official NetVet. Las Vegas is in the desert and it was scorching hot while I was there. Fortunately, the hotels know how to make it cool inside.
My biggest takeaway is that Cisco is making security a high priority. In the past, many companies (including Cisco) seemed to have added security as something they have to do. This year, security was discussed by Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins in his main keynote and it appeared on multiple slides. The message was that Cisco is serious about security.
The security forces at Cisco have been working hard at making things better for all of us. The picture above is from Robbin’s Keynote and was used to describe what Cisco Security is doing. Would you fly on a plane made from different parts or would you like one with parts that all work together? For starters, there is Talos which had a few great sessions last year. This is the threat intelligence arm of security as they scour the Internet for problems and find solutions. ThreatGrid is Cisco’s means to convert some of what Talos does into a sellable product and it can be combined with other products (even non-Cisco ones) as a threat intelligence feed. OpenDNS (2015 acquisition) has become the main part of a new product called Umbrella that uses these solutions to analyze end user traffic for anything malicious. Umbrella seems to be a really cool product as it offers a better way to do URL filtering without using a proxy. It has a lot of really cool security features and I will dive deeper into it another time.