Emma Mak • Staff Writer

Cybersecurity threats are a critical challenge for organizations across all sectors. The constantly evolving threat landscape necessitates innovative and collaborative solutions to protect sensitive data and maintain operational integrity. This is why Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk on March 18 of this year makes so much sense.

Together, Cisco’s networking expertise and Splunk’s observability capabilities provide the most comprehensive security solution for threat prevention, detection, investigation, and response.

A Win for Customers: A Comprehensive Security Framework

Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk represents a monumental step forward in cybersecurity, offering multiple benefits. The most significant is the integration of Splunk’s observability and data analysis capabilities with Cisco’s robust networking and security solutions. This combination enables organizations to have a unified security posture, bridging the gap between networking and security operations for more efficient threat management.

Customers will greatly benefit from enhanced visibility into their IT environments, allowing for better monitoring and faster detection of anomalies. Splunk’s data analytics platforms will now leverage Cisco’s extensive network telemetry, providing comprehensive insights into user behavior, network performance, and potential threats. This holistic view facilitates rapid identification and response to security incidents, reducing the time to mitigate threats and minimizing potential damage.

Moreover, Cisco and Splunk’s combined forces harness the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, offering predictive analytics that can foresee and prevent cyber threats before they become a problem. This proactive approach to cybersecurity enhances operational efficiency and fortifies the protective measures surrounding sensitive data and critical systems.

The seamless integration of these technologies promises reduced complexity in security architecture for customers. With a unified platform, organizations can lower the total cost of ownership and reduce the need for multiple, disparate security tools – simplifying management and making for more effective security strategies.

Industries That Will Benefit the Most

While the comprehensive cybersecurity solution forged by Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk offers advantages for a wide array of industries, certain sectors stand to gain the most from this alliance. The finance, healthcare, and retail industries will particularly benefit.

Finance Sector: Financial institutions are prime targets for cyberattacks because of the high value of the data they manage. The combined observability and data analytics capabilities equip banks and financial firms with tools for real-time threat detection and mitigation. This protects sensitive customer information and financial assets while complying with stringent regulatory requirements.

Healthcare Industry: The healthcare sector deals with sensitive patient data that is critical to both privacy and clinical operations. Enhanced visibility and security are paramount to prevent breaches that could compromise patient care and data integrity. By leveraging the combined strengths of Cisco and Splunk, healthcare organizations can protect electronic health records (EHRs), ensure the integrity of medical devices, and maintain compliance with health information privacy regulations such as HIPAA.

Retail Industry: In the retail sector, the emphasis is on securing payment systems and safeguarding customer information against breaches. Retailers can benefit from the AI-driven threat prediction and prevention systems offered by Cisco and Splunk, ensuring that both in-store and online transactions are secure. By implementing a unified security framework, retailers can protect customer data and reinforce trust, which is crucial for maintaining brand reputation and customer loyalty.

While many industries can reap the benefits of a comprehensive security solution, the finance, healthcare, and retail sectors stand to gain the most due to their high stakes in data security, regulatory compliance, and the need for real-time threat detection and mitigation.

What Compucom Brings to the Table

We’re a Cisco Master Security Partner, and now a Splunk partner, with multiple certifications in the US and Canada and over 20 years of collaborating with Cisco. What we bring to this alliance is our experience and knowledge of Cisco solutions and observability, as well as our general expertise in IT services and managed solutions. Our knowledge in deploying and maintaining technology solutions ensures that organizations can implement these advanced tools seamlessly and maintain them effectively over time.

This triad of capabilities — networking, observability, and managed services — provides a holistic approach to cybersecurity. Together, our partnership gains organizations a panoramic view of the threat landscape and the tools needed to mitigate risks effectively.

Enhancing cybersecurity requires more than state-of-the-art technology; it demands collaboration and continuous innovation. The partnership between Splunk, Cisco, and Compucom provides organizations with a safer and more secure digital environment. We are committed to delivering innovative, efficient, and comprehensive security solutions that address the complexities of the modern threat landscape for our customers.

The post Partners in Strengthening Cybersecurity: Cisco, Splunk, and Compucom appeared first on Compucom.

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Today’s corporate networks are under a lot of pressure. The number of connected devices continues to explode across the world, and more and more of those devices are entering the workplace.

With many corporations shifting to a hybrid schedule, managing everything becomes even more complex.

Employees are bringing their computers (both corporate-owned and personal) between home and work. Visitors also need secure internet access while they’re there. What’s more, innovative Internet of Things (IOT) devices are making corporate headquarters more efficient and enjoyable…but they also create cybersecurity risks.

In many cases, businesses struggle to see, control, and secure it all.

That’s where Cisco’s Identity Services Engine (ISE) comes in. ISE lets you:

• See users, endpoints, and applications
• Secure the network by segmenting and controlling network access
• Share important contextual information with technology partners

What is Cisco Identity Services Engine (Cisco ISE)

Cisco ISE is an industry-leading tool that modernizes network access control. With ISE, you can control access to your corporate network across wired, wireless VPN, and 5G connections.

ISE allows you to provide highly secure network access to a variety of users and devices — using centralized policies to decide if a device is allowed on your network, and which permissions they should get.

This helps connect trusted devices to trusted services, so the right people get access to the right data.

ISE is available on a scalable subscription model, with four licensing options based on your specific use cases.

Cisco ISE for Enterprises

More Visibility and Insight

With ISE, you have greater visibility into what’s happening on your network.

The platform gives a detailed view into every endpoint and device — who is connected, how they’re connected, which apps are installed or currently running, and who is accessing what.

ISE also stores a detailed history of all endpoints and users. This data helps your IT team make fully informed decisions to protect the network and unearth threats faster.

Stronger Security

ISE offers extensive policy management tools so that IT administrators can apply access and usage policies across the entire network. This controls who, what, when, where, and how people can access the network.

ISE also uses built-in authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), profiling, and posture services to ensure that every endpoint meets your security standards.

To help identify and stop security threats faster, ISE also shares important contextual information with integrated solutions from Cisco or third-party technology partners (like us!), adding an extra layer of protection as those services work together.

Simplified Guest Access

How will you welcome visitors, customers, or contractors? ISE makes it easy to provide visitors with multiple levels of access without compromising your security.

You can customize guest access through a basic hotspot (like a coffee shop), self-service registered access or employee-sponsored access. Of course, IT gets a real-time view to monitoring guests’ access, activity, and device security compliance.

Cost Saving

According to research from Forrester Consulting, ISE helps organizations save big on security and IT staffing costs, too!

By streamlining processes and protecting the business from security breaches, enterprises that deploy ISE could see a 191% ROI over the first three years.

The Forrester study noted that cost savings from improved security were the “single greatest factor in a return on investment.” This was thanks to a 50% reduction in security incidents, plus a decrease in the number of staff resources needed to respond to access-related security breaches, they said.

Getting Started

We help our enterprise clients get the most out of Cisco ISE’s features to align with your priorities—including security, audit, and network teams’ requirements and mandates.

At Compucom, we offer a wide range of professional services and projects that optimize your network and maximize the return on your technology investments.

As a proud Cisco Gold Certified Partner, turn to us to:

• Design, deploy, and implement your technology and infrastructure upgrades
• Create or update your centralized network access policy
• Implement network segmentation to make sure the right people get access
• Plan for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and guest-access needs
• Craft a return-to-office strategy that ensures every endpoint is safe
• Implement turnkey ISE solutions

Book a meeting with us to explore the benefits of Cisco ISE’s technical features—including threat assessment, micro-segmentation, endpoint compliance, and more.

Already using Cisco ISE? We’ll help you optimize your current ISE deployment to meet your unique priorities; complete a network health and best practices assessment to get started.

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