When the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) announced the TLS 1.3 standard in RFC 8446 in August 2018, plenty of tools and utilities were already supporting it (even as early as the year prior, some web browsers had implemented it as their default standard, only having to roll it back due to compatibility issues. Needless to say, the rollout was not perfect).
Toward the end of 2018, EMA conducted a survey of customers regarding their TLS 1.3 implementation and migration plans. In the January 2019 report, EMA concluded:
Some participants’ organizations may find they have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a Plan B to enable TLS 1.3 without losing visibility, introducing unacceptable performance bottlenecks and greatly increasing operational overhead. Whether they feel they have no choice but to enable TLS 1.3 because major web server and browser vendors have already pushed ahead with it or because they need to keep pace with the industry as it embraces the new standard is unclear. What is clear is that security practitioners see the new standard as offering greater privacy and end-to-end data security for their organizations, and that the long wait for its advancement is over.
When EMA asked many of the same questions in an updated survey of 204 technology and business leaders toward the end of 2022, they found that nearly all the conclusions in the 2018/2019 report still hold true today. Here are the three biggest takeaways from this most recent survey:
While regulatory frameworks and vendor controls continue to push the adoption of the TLS 1.3 standard, adoption still comes with a significant price tag – one that many organizations are just not yet ready or able to consume. Technology improvements will increase rates of adoption over time, such as Cisco Secure Firewall’s ability to decrypt and inspect encrypted traffic. More recent and unique technologies, like Cisco’s encrypted visibility engine, allow the firewall to recognize attack patterns in encrypted traffic without decryption. This latter functionality preserves performance and privacy of the encrypted flows without sacrificing the visibility and monitoring that 94% of respondents were concerned about.
Readers wishing to read the full EMA report can do so here and readers wishing to learn more about Cisco Secure Firewall’s encyrpted visibility engine can do so here.
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We’ve all seen the headlines like “race to the cloud” and “cloud-first.” These articles and publications are true, more and more customers have adopted cloud strategies, but there is more to the story. In these customer conversations, cloud security and network security are often discussed in unison. Why is that?
Customers desire freedom and choice when establishing resilience across every aspect of their business, and this requires both the ability to remain agile, and maintain control of their organization’s most sensitive data. Neither of these can be achieved with just the cloud, or private data center. Organizations are investing in hybrid-multicloud environments to ensure continuity amidst unpredictable threats and change. But these investments will fall short if they do not include security.
The modern enterprise relies on the network more than ever before, and it looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago. According to our 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, where 2,500 global IT leaders were interviewed across 13 countries, 82% said they have adopted hybrid cloud architectures, and 47% of organizations use between two and three public IaaS clouds1. As organizations have grown more dependent on the network, the more complex it has become, making firewall capabilities the most critical element of the hybrid-multicloud security strategy. And Cisco has a firewall capability for every strategy, protecting your most important assets no matter where you choose to deploy it.
In May, Cisco brought offerings from Umbrella and Duo to the AWS Marketplace. Today at AWS Re:Inforce, Cisco Secure announced furthering its partnership with AWS to drive innovation with the goal to protect the integrity of your business. Validating our commitment to hybrid-multicloud security, Cisco has received the AWS Security Competency Partner designation for Network and Infrastructure Security. This designation was awarded through our demonstrated success with customer engagements and rigorous technical validations of Secure Firewall.
This week at AWS Re:Inforce, customers can stop by our booth to see our latest firewall innovation. Cisco Secure Firewall as-a-service on AWS builds on our existing portfolio, giving organizations greater flexibility and choice with a radically simplified SaaS offering. If organizations are truly to embrace security across the multi-environment IT, customers demand simplification without compromising security. With a SaaS-based form factor, management and deployment complexity is reduced. NetOps and SecOps teams will enjoy a simplified security architecture where provisioning of firewalls and control plane infrastructure are managed by Cisco. This will save your teams time by removing the need to rearchitect the network, freeing them to focus on protecting the integrity of your business.
As organizations continue to move more of their day-to-day operations to the cloud, Cisco and AWS are committed to ensure that security is an integral part of their hybrid multi-cloud strategy. We all have seen the impact of security that is bolted on, or too complex. If we are truly to find that balance between agility and protection to ensure business continuity, we need to ensure the same protections we have in the private infrastructure are easily consumed no matter where your data may roam.
Product page: Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud
Partner page: Cisco solutions on AWS
Blog: Securing cloud is everyone’s responsibility
Quick Start page: Cisco solutions on AWS
Amazon Partner Network page: Cisco solutions on AWS
2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report
1 Henderson, N. & Hanselman, E. (2022, May 25). 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report.
S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Cisco Systems.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/hybrid-cloud/2022-trends.html ‘
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