As more businesses build websites and engage in ecommerce as an entry into the digital universe, many are relentlessly fighting against a scheming and cunning enemy – cyber attackers. In fact, according to the Ponemon Institute, a research group devoted to information security and data protection, 55% of businesses with less than 1,000 employees received a cyber attack within the last year.
Cisco believed there was a dire and desperate need for a solution. To address that, they built a digital security service called the Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud to make cyber protection more accessible to companies large and small.
Automated and effective security
The Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is designed to replace the public cloud. Cisco aims for this product to provide “fewer network monitoring capabilities even as it undergoes a very high change rate in assets. To provide effective security while reducing the number of false positives, a new approach is necessary.”
Cisco built its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to protect digital assets more effectively by analyzing potential cyber threats using automated analysis. With this, the Stealthwatch Cloud aids in responding to an incident as it happens since it “provides the actionable security intelligence and visibility necessary to identify these kinds of malicious activities in real-time.”
Cisco has cited many evident benefits of such a service. Among rapid recognition of threats, Stealthwatch Cloud can detect, and even predict, activity and sudden changes in host or device behavior. This is done by doing a comparison against previous observations. It can also detect anomalies in data transmission, inconsistencies in entity activity, as well as violations against organizational policies, “including protocol and port use, device and resource profile characteristics, and blacklisted communications.”
Ease and visibility against potential threats
Don’t just take Cisco’s word for it though. According to Taylor Higley, Director of Information Services at the American Federation of Government Employees, “this service gives us much better visibility into all of the devices in our VPC and their network activity. If one ever behaves in a suspicious or abnormal fashion, we can take fast action to resolve possible issues.”
The Stealthwatch Cloud seems to be everything one could ask for in software security. According to Cisco, ease for the customer was a prime concern, saying the service is “easy to try, easy to buy, and simple to operate and maintain.” Hopefully, with this new technology, the current reign of hackers and cyber attackers will soon fall.
YouTube: Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud in 2 minutes
Photo credits: The feature image has been taken by Andrew Barresi for the U.S. Department of Defense. All other images used are owned by Cisco and have been provided for press usage.
Source: Ponemon Institute
