Cisco Systems has announced 14 security products and services in the space of a week, including three new products and an important revision to its security management software that supports threat-protection technology gained in the April acquisition of Okena.
The Okena-originated technology, now known as the Cisco Security Agent (CSA), looks at user behaviours and takes steps to stop actions that a company deems objectionable before they can cause harm, senior director of product and technology marketing at Cisco, Jeff Platon, said.
CSA didn't try to match signatures to prevent malicious activities, but it followed behaviours, he said. For example, if a desktop user tried to launch an unusual application, CSA would stop the launch, Platon said.
The technology resides on desktops and servers but is supported by Cisco's upgraded CiscoWorks VPN/Security Management Solution (VMS) 2.2, that is also being enhanced to support the Cisco Catalyst 6500 firewall and virtual private network services modules.
Other announcements included a new one-touch router-lockdown capability and new intelligent wizards for configuring firewall and IPsec VPN services on certain Cisco routers. Analyst at Infonetics Research, Jeff Wilson, said the 14 Cisco announcements were "small but important to somebody out there". But taken together, they showed Cisco was focusing on many areas of security.
Cisco has "quietly insinuated" itself into the security market, winning $US1 billion annually for devices with security software installed, he said.
The VMS upgrade was important, Wilson said, but "no vendor is good at this yet" because there were dozens of arcane security standards. "It's hard to build good security management solutions," he said.
