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Consistent malware protection

Addressing the needs of South African customers to combat zero-day attacks and advanced persistent threats (APTs), Cisco is broadening its Advanced Malware Protection and Data Centre security offering. This will help in protecting against threats across the full attack continuum – before, during, and after an attack. The innovation to both portfolios further supports Cisco’s strategy to deliver intelligent cybersecurity for the real world.

The newest updates to Cisco’s Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) make it the first solution to correlate Indications of Compromise (IoC) data between network and endpoint, with integrated threat defence, shared intelligence, and pervasive protection against zero day threats. AMP also now features Mac OSX support and a Private Cloud Appliance, an on-premise solution that delivers continuous analysis.

Cisco is also increasing data centre and cloud protection with enhancements to its ASA firewall family, offering performance, scalability and flexibility. These enhancements support advances in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) environments.

Greg Griessel, consulting systems engineer, security solutions at Cisco South Africa

“The Internet of Everything (IoE) is creating significant opportunities as more devices, processes and users come online in South Africa and cybersecurity models must radically change to provide the right protection for this connected world,” said Greg Griessel, consulting systems engineer security solutions at Cisco South Africa. “We are seeing that major industries in South Africa, such as mining and agriculture, are becoming increasingly connected and this has resulted in a sharp rise in malware attacks.

“According to the Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report released earlier in the year, Middle East and Africa regions are posting strong adoption of smart devices creating advanced threats, infiltrating environments at the endpoint, in the data centre and through the cloud. Cisco’s mission is to provide solutions that move beyond point-in-time to an anytime, all-the-time threat-centric security model that works continuously across the extended network,” says Griessel.

Pervasive advanced malware protection

Bridging the gap between network and endpoint protection, AMP was recently named one of the top solutions in an NSS Labs Security Value Map (SVM) for Breach Detection Systems (BDS) – outpacing other vendor solutions in protection and cost-effectiveness. Unlike these other solutions that simply detect malware at a point-in-time, AMP delivers unrelenting detection and response capabilities across the full attack continuum.

Increasing data centre and cloud protection to support the advances being made in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) environments, Cisco is delivering performance, scalability and flexibility with its ASAv and updated ASA 5585-X firewalls. Both are designed to provide critical protection without compromising data centre performance. The ASA solutions provision in hours or minutes, feature elastic scalability to eliminate bottlenecks and weave security into the intelligent data centre fabric, not just at the edge. Cisco is also releasing a new version of its Secure Data Centre Cisco Validated Design (CVD), which significantly simplifies the secure deployment of new solutions.

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