SAN JOSE, Calif. – February 23, 2018 — For more than 20 years, Rackspace, a leading provider of IT managed services, has collaborated with Cisco to provide the highest levels of security for its company and its customers’ networks. Today, Cisco and Rackspace continue their long-standing collaboration by delivering Rackspace customers advanced protection against evolving sophisticated threats in their multicloud journey.

Organizations are increasingly leveraging the benefits of the multicloud world to drive operational efficiencies, flexibility, scalability and growth expansion. More than 50 percent of security professionals said they host networks in the cloud because of better data security; 48 percent, because of scalability; and 46 percent, because of ease of use[1]. As adversaries increasingly weaponize cloud services, dynamic workloads moving to the cloud are at risk of creating new threat vectors. These vectors can come from the companies’ premises, to the cloud, and to threats coming directly from the internet.

“The cloud is the future of IT for all businesses, but for many companies, the journey to the cloud can be a challenge,” said Brian Kelly, Chief Security Officer, Rackspace. “One of the biggest hurdles and concerns for these companies is security – customers want to know that their data is protected with the most up-to-date and innovative technologies, even as their cloud needs evolve. Through our close collaboration with Cisco in threat protection, we are committed to helping secure our clients’ evolving and expanding journey to the cloud.”

To help protect its customers’ hosted environments, Rackspace continues to pilot Cisco’s advanced security solutions. Recognized as one of Cisco’s largest firewall customers, Rackspace has deployed and served as a testing partner for Cisco’s stateful firewall, the ASA series, to the ASA 5500-X Series, to now the Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewall for advanced threat protection. Rackspace is deploying high volumes of Cisco’s Next-Generation Firewalls and integrating them directly into its services,  helping enable its customers to manage their hosted environments more efficiently and securely.

“As a company that is committed to enabling its customers on their digital transformation journeys, Rackspace is constantly evolving to solve customers’ IT challenges,” said David Neuman, Chief Information Security Officer, Rackspace. “The value of a partner that understands what a global market is looking for in different customer verticals is extremely important to us. We depend on partners like Cisco to help us understand not only what we’re doing today, but what’s on the horizon and we can collaborate to deliver next-generation capabilities.”

Rackspace benefits from the industry’s first fully integrated, threat-focused next-generation firewall, Cisco Firepower, which:

• Stops more threats – both known and unknown – with the industry’s most effective threat protection.
• Provides more insight into and control over the users, applications, devices, threats, and vulnerabilities in the network.
• Detects earlier and acts faster by shrinking malware time to detection from months down to hours and enables quicker remediation
• Reduces complexity and simplifies operations by consolidating all security functions into a single management interface

“Today’s attacks are multivector. Customers need to have multiple layers of defense to combat sophisticated attacks, and Cisco brings an integrated architectural advantage to the market,” said David Ulevitch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group. “Cisco is committed to helping protect and secure our longtime partner Rackspace and its customers’ cloud environments.”

Hear more from Rackspace and Cisco executives on their close collaboration in this video here.

Supporting Resources

• Blog: Cisco and Rackspace Deliver Advanced Security for the Multicloud
• Rackspace Blog: More Firepower: Cisco and Rackspace Deliver Advanced Security for Multi-Cloud Environments
• Cisco 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report
• Follow Cisco on Twitter @CiscoSecurity
• Like Cisco Security on Facebook

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