Cisco has announced that Cisco Tetration Analytics now automates policy enforcement, enabling organisations to build secure environments for their business applications and also expands Tetration with new deployment options.
Building on Tetration’s original discovery and visibility capabilities, Cisco’s latest software for Tetration Analytics now provides the industry’s first consistent security policy enforcement applied holistically across each application. Policy is enforced regardless of where the application resides: virtual, bare metal, physical servers, or in private or public clouds, across any vendor’s infrastructure. This new enforcement model binds policies to workload characteristics and behaviours while ensuring that the policy stays intact even as the workload moves.
“Enterprises worldwide are adopting multi-cloud strategies to realise their objectives for digital transformation, but these present ongoing challenges related to visibility and security. Although 80 percent of security spending is focused on the perimeter, only 20 percent of the breaches occur there. IT organisations are often under siege by a mix of elevated expectations and a rising tide of security threats, not to mention the need to show ongoing improvements in operational efficiencies,” said Osama Al-Zoubi, Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Middle East. “Cisco Tetration Analytics addresses these challenges through pervasive visibility and application segmentation, which is designed to bolster security-policy enforcement across hybrid application environments.”
According to Cisco, today’s complex business applications often span hundreds of servers residing on a wide array of heterogeneous infrastructure, both in the data centre and in the cloud. This complexity is further compounded by virtualisation technologies, application mobility and constant application changes due to modern DevOps environments. As a result, IT managers are challenged to understand an application’s components, their communication pattern and dependencies – all necessary to meet security requirements for modern applications.
Tetration Analytics takes micro-segmentation– a security technique enabling workload separation – a leap further by delivering “application segmentation”, which consistently drives policies across the application layer, regardless of where the application resides: virtualised, bare metal, physical servers, or in the cloud. Policies can be pushed to any vendor’s firewall, and can be orchestrated at the network layer as well. Compared to static legacy solutions, Tetration provides actionable results dynamically based on behavior analysis of billions of flows, processes, and workload characteristics. Consistent policy is enforced through the workload agent for any workload, anywhere.
Cisco is also delivering two new deployment models for Tetration Analytics. In addition to the original large scale platform, Cisco now offers a new smaller-scale platform, Tetration-M, suitable for deployments up to 1,000 workloads. Cisco is also introducing a new cloud appliance with software deployed in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tetration Cloud – also suitable for deployments up to 1000 workloads. Regardless of the deployment model, Tetration can monitor workloads in private as well as public clouds.
Tetration Analytics now enables customers and ecosystem partners the ability to write their own applications that access data stored on the platform. Users can bring their own analytics algorithms to Tetration to create apps that generate customised data exports and notifications in open formats specific to their business needs. Cisco is continuing its tradition of open ecosystems by working with partner companies to build applications and integrations with their solutions: AlgoSec, Citrix, Dell EMC, F5, Infoblox, ServiceNow, and Tufin.
