BT Partners with Cisco on IT Security

How to Mitigate the Risk of Data Loss and Disruption in 2016

At a time when both the type and volume of IT security attacks continue to increase, carriers, in general, are under more pressure than ever to be able to deliver “clean pipes” to customers. With that goal in mind, BT announced today a global partnership with Cisco under which BT will apply more automation to the detection of vulnerabilities and remediation once an attack is detected.

Sam Rastogi, senior security product marketing director for Cisco, says thanks to the rise of mobile computing, the cloud and the coming of the Internet of Things (IoT), carriers now recognize that they are increasingly the focal point of IT security attacks. As such, many of them are making increased investments in their ability to not only secure their own networks, but also the networks they manage on behalf of their customers.

It’s even now arguable that the front line of IT security defense is not the perimeter of the enterprise, but rather the actual carrier network now being used to connect to a plethora of endpoints that many organizations don’t exercise much control over today. In fact, if an IT organization has to mitigate a threat within its own network, it means to one degree or another that it is expending time and effort it shouldn’t have to if only the carrier networks it relies on were more secure.

Rastogi says that the alliance with BT reflects the massive investments that Cisco has put into IT security, including most recently the acquisition of Lancope, a provider of security intelligence tools based on advanced analytics. Going forward, Rastogi says that while it’s critical for Cisco to remain open from an interoperability perspective, one of the primary benefits of partnering with Cisco is its ability to collapse all the IT security silos within a single management framework.

Obviously, Cisco is not the only vendor with similar security ambitions. But it is one of the few vendors with a broad enough product portfolio to actually pull an IT security management framework together spanning everything from the endpoints on the network to the analytics needed to proactively protect it.