SAN JOSE, Calif., February 13, 2006 - Cisco Systems®, Inc. today announced the availability of the Cisco Security Management Suite, a new integrated set of security management applications that provide an improved operational framework for system-wide security policy enforcement and administration.
The Cisco Security Management Suite includes the new Cisco Security Manager (CSM) as well as a new version of the Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis and Response System (Cisco Security MARS) version 4.2. This suite provides customers with a powerful and integrated monitoring, configuration and management solution for identifying and enforcing policies associated with data monitoring. The collaborative nature of the applications also helps to identify threats centrally and protects the infrastructure on a global scale. The security management suite helps reduce operational expenditures and gives less experienced users the ability to perform complex global IT security-policy tasks. These new management applications simplify support for Cisco's Self-Defending Network security strategy, which helps organizations identify, prevent and adapt to the ever-changing security and threat landscape.
"We are finding several evolutionary factors driving the next generation of security management including the need for improved operational efficiencies between network and security operations groups within organizations, the ability for organizations to manage security events from multiple vendor solutions, and transition away from device by device to end-to-end security service management," said George Hamilton, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group. "The Cisco Security Management Suite represents a solid step in the right direction. The integration of these applications into a single suite delivers greater business and operational agility to react to and manage self-defending networks."
Cisco Security Manager: Delivering Advanced Security Management and Control
The Cisco Security Manager delivers simplified and flexible policy and unified security management throughout an organization. It provides different system "views" at the device, policy, and topology levels for differing operational preferences and needs.
The device-centric view helps an organization view the security devices and the policies that can be administered on them. The policy-centric view creates and customizes policies specific to business needs that can be adapted to future business requirements. The topology-centric view provides a visual representation of the network that scales through linked network maps and allows an administrator to manage policies directly from this specific view. These different views provide an easy-to-use and integrated management framework of all security services including firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Intrusion Prevention Service (IPS).
The Cisco Security Manager also includes additional capabilities that provide administrators with the ability to separate a policy from the devices that are enforcing it so that it can then be shared and applied to other devices in the network. This "policy abstraction and sharing" capability helps boost business productivity. The Cisco Security Manager now also offers the ability to provide distributed deployment of polices to increase network availability and resilience. New workflow capabilities offer a structured process for change management that can complement any operational environment and help improve policy compliance. It lets customers establish what group within an IT organization can set policies and the associated approval and deployment cycles. This allows customers with both network operations and security operations groups to foster more collaboration and establish a scope of control for each group.
Cisco Security MARS Enhancements
As part of the Cisco Security Management Suite, Cisco Security MARS collects, correlates and reports on security events from both Cisco and non-Cisco devices. CS-MARS correlates the security events, and provides concise and actionable information or "incidents." Customers are then provided with a visual representation of the incident, the affected point in the network, and the best point of mitigation.
Cisco Security MARS version 4.2 includes more dynamic and real-time event viewing and categorization capabilities as well as expanded device support. For example, users can now more quickly identify unusual traffic via real-time filtering of security event data. In collaboration with the Cisco Security Manager, the administrator can very quickly identify exactly which device and policy is responsible for allowing or denying that traffic. This dramatically improves network availability and reduces operational costs.
Pricing and Availability
Cisco Security Manager 3.0 will be provided in a Standard Edition starting at $3,500 USD and a Professional Edition starting at $15,000 USD and is scheduled to be available in Q1CY'06. Cisco Security MARS starts at $15,000 and release 4.2 is scheduled to be available in Q2CY'06.
