Johannesburg, 01 Aug 2024
The organisation’s consumption of services and applications has changed and this change has introduced unexpected risks and vulnerabilities. Companies are navigating a rapidly evolving landscape while simultaneously protecting themselves against sophisticated threats. Threat detection and response in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) demands that companies reimagine their security management with solutions that aren’t just capable of protection but are agile and intelligent enough to proactively defend the business.
This is according to Nabeel Rajab, technical solutions architect at Cisco, who spoke to ITWeb about how threat actors have evolved exponentially over the past decade and how technology is helping companies address the vulnerabilities and challenges this evolution has introduced.
“How we consume applications, host them, run them, these approaches have all changed,” he says. “Public cloud and hyperscalers are now providing hyper-distributed components across the world with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures being used to optimise how companies use the cloud to its full potential. Applications are seamlessly served up to end-users on their devices, but the back-end is hundreds of thousands, even millions, of tiny components.”
In this hyper-distributed world, one of the trends that has emerged is the need for visibility. Because these applications are so distributed, companies need visibility to understand how to implement the attack frameworks required to protect these environments, and not just determine how they can funnel communication between all these components through centralised areas, for complete enterprise security.
AI has implications for security
“When you look at the exponential growth of data centres, the challenges around application hosting and then add on top of this the explosion of AI tools and services, it takes data security risk to a new level,” says Rajab. “There are implications around how we build and run the data centre today. You need good data as this informs decision-making, and you need resources to ensure your business can handle the demands of AI. Then there are multiple layers of data protection required to ensure these tools aren’t used in a malicious way.”
These are, he explains, very distributed environments with high-end, intelligent technology behind them so if organisations don’t have security controls in place, they are vulnerable to attacks. And these attacks are only increasing in severity and sophistication. Companies need security software solutions capable of proactively defending against targeted attacks in a changing landscape.
“Cisco Hypershield is one of the most fundamental shifts within our business as we’ve reimagined how we do security integration in the data centre today, and in the future,” says Rajab. “We recognised that the landscape is evolving at a speed humans are finding difficult to keep up with, so we have created a cyber-security platform built natively on AI that allows us to understand your environment with impressive accuracy.”
The solution allows for companies to scale quickly without compromising on security. Cisco Hypershield provides a fabric of advanced threat protection that’s as hyper-distributed as the environments it protects. The capability is embedded deep within the applications themselves through to the operating systems, the kernel, the network and everything else in between.
“This solution,” says Rajab, “leaves no stone unturned. There is always a fine balance between protection and availability, and Cisco Hypershield deftly manages this within an intelligent architecture that doesn’t impact the entire environment. Cloud native, designed for AI, consumed as a service, and built on small hyper-distributed components, it is an intensely agile and secure platform designed for the modern organisation.”
To find out more about Cisco Hypershield and how it delivers on its security promise within the hyper-distributed application and business landscape, watch the video here.
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