Cisco on Cisco

As organizations become increasingly borderless, traditional security practices must evolve to provide the right level of protection for today's business environment. Several enterprise trends require new approaches to security:

• Any device: A recent wave of “IT consumerization” has users expecting IT to provide secure access to corporate networks, systems, data and services on a variety of end devices, including PCs, Macs, tablets, and smart phones.
• Cloud computing: The financial and technology benefits of private- and public-cloud architectures are changing traditional hosted application models.
• Globalization: As enterprises continue to expand globally and have to manage the cost of doing business, security policies and technologies need to keep pace with various compliance and regulatory requirements.
• Distributed workforce and remote working: Growing numbers of mobile and remote workers fuel the business need for access to corporate resources beyond traditional campus boundaries, from branch offices, home offices, partner sites, travel sites, and more.
• Collaboration: Enterprises are having to rely increasingly on new architectures and solutions for unified communications, collaboration, and video as they have become progressively vital to employee productivity.
• Virtualization: Coupled with cloud computing, virtualization of resources within and beyond the data center are generating tremendous business benefits along with the need for advanced security strategies and solutions.

Cisco is moving confidently along the journey toward an “Any Service, Any Device, Anywhere” environment with many network, technology and security components already in place. The Virtual Enterprise is a logical evolution for Cisco, in which a business becomes increasingly location and service independent, has a mature identity model that allows for granular access control and external collaboration, and the full extent of security controls and capabilities are being applied to enterprise data.

Cisco IT and the Cisco Security Programs Organization partner with various Cisco groups, industry peers, and standards bodies to address security challenges related to governance, acceptable-use policies, change management, and technologies.