Cisco lays out 'cloud neutral' security pitch at Cisco Live in Melbourne

Cisco leaders told thousands of attendees at the Cisco Live conference in Melbourne this week how the vendor wants to unify security for companies dealing with complex hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments.

They pitched Cisco as a "cloud neutral" provider of security, simplifying security and freeing customers from public cloud lock-in. 

“We believe that there is a very consequential opportunity in making sure that you can abstract security and networking from the IaaS vendors,” said Cisco executive VP and GM of security and collaboration, Jeetu Patel.

“What we would want to do is make sure that we can actually acquire all traffic, and steer it to any of the cloud providers while maintaining your security policy, and while maintaining a security posture, regardless of which cloud your workload goes to,” Patel said.

There is a need for this, Patel argued, because organisations are being locked into public clouds.  “These [public cloud] vendors tend to have a full stack of services from storage, to compute, to networking, to security, that works really well within their ecosystem. But the moment you go out and have a multiple cloud scenario, it gets to be very hard to do,” he said.

A “cloud neutral party” could address this, Patel said. Unsurprisingly, he said Cisco can play that role.

Earlier this year, the company unveiled the Cisco Security Cloud, an open standards platform combing networking, security and threat intelligence services, with a unified policy engine and open APIs for third party integration.   

“Southbound, you can go out and connect to any of the major cloud providers. Northbound, you can go out and use any of the data services from any of the platform-as-a-service vendors,” Patel told Cisco Live attendees in Melbourne this week.

Using Cisco Security Cloud, users working in a workplace, at home or a coffee shop would connect to the security cloud, and from there connect to a SaaS application, the Internet or a private application running in their organisation’s data centre. The Cisco Security Cloud could also connect and segment Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The Cisco Security Cloud would have services around zero trust, SASE and firewall, and a unified policy engine. Cisco Security Cloud points of presence would be needed to minimise latency and increase performance. 

Patel’s pitch was that instead of organisations buying a firewall, Internet access, private access and endpoint from different vendors, they could choose a single, open and extensible, AI-driven Cisco platform.

Where Telstra, Equinix, hyperscalers fit in this picture

Cisco's move to try and capture the market around multi-cloud connectivity and related security services is aligned with enterprise IT demand, said Sydney-based GlobalData Technology senior analyst Malcolm Rogers.

However, Rogers noted that Cisco is far from the only major player looking to capture the cloud networking opportunity.  

“The hyperscalers themselves are looking to increase penetration into networking and security. For example, Azure's Virtual WAN,” Rogers told CRN Australia.

“Cisco does make a good point that it can provide a vendor neutral approach to multi-cloud management, but again there are other neutral providers. For example, Equinix has developed Equinix Fabric, a software defined interconnect platform that offers easy connections into all the leading cloud providers, its own data centres and co-located customer environments.” 

Telcos are also looking to capture this market by using their networks to deliver a cloud connectivity platform, Rogers pointed out. He cited Telstra's Cloud Connector or PCCW's Console Connect as examples. 

“Overall, I don't think it is a zero-sum game, and Cisco can partner as often as it competes. It's already selling some of its services on AWS marketplace, Cisco is also one of the SD-WAN partners that powers Equinix Fabric, and it enables lots of Telstra's networking services as well.”