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Cisco announces innovations, investments in India's security infrastructure

It is introducing new risk-based capabilities across its security portfolio

Daisy-Chittilapilly

With a steady increase in digitisation across organisations and individuals, there is an immense focus on trust in the digital world. Organisation such as Cisco is shouldering the tremendous responsibility of ensuring that this trust is maintained, said Daisy Chittilapilly, president, Cisco India and SAARC, during the Cisco India Summit 2023 being held in Jaipur.

“The world is becoming increasingly hybrid, and organisations have to adapt quickly. Their success hinges in large part on their ability to tackle the cyber security risks that this presents,” remarked Chittilapilly. Interestingly Cisco’s 'My Location, My Device: Hybrid Work's New Cybersecurity Challenge' survey recently found that nine out of ten security leaders in India expect cybersecurity incidents to disrupt their businesses in the next two years.

Cisco also launched new capabilities across Zero Trust and cloud application to help organisations in India address growing cyber security needs. At the same time, the US-headquartered company has also expanded its data centre footprint in India to help companies protect devices, remote users, and distributed locations.

“We are committed to helping Indian organisations enhance security resilience so they can turn their digitisation into a competitive advantage. We are introducing innovative cyber capabilities, expanding our security data centre footprint, and continuing to build a dedicated engineering workforce in India to help organisations fortify their defenses and catalyse their transformation in the digital age,” said Chittilapilly.

It was also announced during the summit that as Indian organisations accelerate their journey to the cloud, Cisco is investing in a dedicated cloud infrastructure to bring security services to more customers in India in a seamless and scalable manner. As a part of this expansion, Cisco is setting up a new data centre in Chennai and upgrading the current one in Mumbai to offer enhanced security solutions to its customers.

It is expected that the company's new and upgraded facilities would help it bring agile, highly resilient, high-capacity access closer to users, including large and small Indian enterprises from across industries. It was discussed that a hybrid work environment presents unique cyber security challenges as organisations move from a static to a dynamic operating model, significantly increasing the demand for cloud security.

During discussions, experts pointed out that in the present scenario as companies look to safeguard themselves, they are moving towards concepts such as Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and Zero Trust to be adequately prepared to tackle the risks these shifts present. SASE combines traditional network security functions with software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) capabilities. It allows organisations to provide secure and reliable access to cloud based applications and services for remote workers, regardless of their location.

Cisco also launched many new features for its Duo Risk-Based Authentication to address security issues, including remembered devices and Wi-Fi fingerprint to authenticate less often in trusted situations, Verified Push to protect against phishing attacks, and expanded SSO capabilities that notify and allow users to reset their passwords before they expire keeping in view the needs for modern enterprises.

India remains a critical market for Cisco and it has its second largest R&D outside the US in Bengaluru. The company also has a sizable workforce in India in the space of security engineering. These employees work on cutting-edge security solutions and also support the company's business model transformation towards software and subscriptions. 

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