Cisco amps up security breach protection service

Cisco is adding a new top-level service tier to its suite of security offerings aimed at helping customers monitor, detect, investigate and remediate threats across the enterprise.

New to the lineup is a Premier level of service for Cisco’s Breach Protection Suite, an integrated set of the vendor’s security products including its extended detection and response (XDR), secure endpoint and email threat defense packages.

Cisco’s XDR service brings together multiple Cisco and third-party security products to control network access, analyze incidents, remediate threats, and automate responses, all from a single cloud-based interface. Cisco’s endpoint and email security packages handle functions such as spotting and blocking threats and controlling malware, for example.

Breach Protection Premier adds managed XDR (MXDR); it’s operated by a dedicated team of Cisco security specialists who monitor, detect, and investigate threats across the enterprise environment with the goal of quickly remediating threats through guided response actions, according to Nirav Shah, product marketing manager with Cisco Secure, who wrote a blog about the newly available Premier offering.

“Many security teams cannot quickly and effectively detect and respond to attacks due to a lack of resources, high operational complexity, and an overload of alerts,” Shah wrote. “Some organizations also find it time- or cost-prohibitive to build and run their own security operations, while others have small teams that struggle to monitor their environment 24/7.”

Breach Protection Premier can alleviate those issues. It also includes Cisco Technical Security Assessment and select Cisco Talos Incident Response services to help customers prepare for and respond to attacks through a full set of proactive and incident response services, according to Shah. “Breach Protection Premier also detects and responds to advanced threats sooner by prioritizing the most critical alerts and combining our human expertise with AI-driven processes and tool sets,” Shah wrote. “When threats are found, you can shorten remediation times with automated response actions that we carry out on your behalf.”

In addition, the service can help customers accelerate adoption of new security tools – regardless of vector or vendor – since the managed service includes integration support for third-party offerings, according to Shah.

The Premier level of protection builds on services included in the other two levels of Cisco’s Breach Protection services: Essentials, which focuses on email, endpoint and basic XDR services, and the Advantage level, which includes network-based breach detection support and protection for IoT devices, Cisco stated.