By Paul, Thompson, Cisco Business Unit Director, CAE
Today, CAE has been awarded Cisco's Master Security Specialised certification, 
in recognition of our deep understanding and working knowledge of Cisco Security technologies.
This award is a clear testament to the partnership between CAE and Cisco, now in its third decade. It reinforces our view; that people need amazing technology and technology needs amazing people. To achieve this certification within three months of a Master Enterprise Networks is a phenomenal feat.
We embrace the very latest Cisco Security in our world class CAE Labs, as well as building real world experiences of these technologies, delivered to our customers, protecting them from risk and threats.
With the new complex world of IT operations, security challenges are being presented at an unmatched rate. The sheer number of applications, let alone the distributed nature of them; with hybrid workforces, connected devices and ever-growing data requirements, will only continue to increase the need for risk mitigation to deal with key factors of dealing with this landscape.
At CAE we dedicate ourselves to be able to bring the best innovation and expertise to our customers. Showing how technology can elevate people capabilities and streamline processes to drive transformation. From a security perspective, our ability to deliver to clients, this market leading security expertise, directly addresses the skills shortage we see in cybersecurity and vastly reduces mundane repetitive tasks.
It is our belief that to build the foundations of the future now, an end-to-end approach is needed. Security can be done in isolation but, there will come a point where the people and the processes associated to this method, will not be able to scale with the countless products and vendors that are added to the stack. If we think about it, how can a person or team be proficient, let alone an expert in all the products and vendors that occupy a crowded security landscape? How can they effectively update, configure and ensure that there is interoperability between all of these individual products and solutions with different terminology, and tool sets? How can you correlate the telemetry, compare logs, and confidently respond to threats?
Of course, there will be some organisations that can and will have the skills to be able to do this, but for the majority, there has to be a better way. It's not necessarily the known threats, it's how do you protect against the unknown threats or even identify them. The foundations for this, as mentioned before, is vendor consolidation to a platform approach. A platform that can correlate data and provide real time contextual information to the people to make decisions and take action, based on the full picture. It is not a 'one vendor' platform, it is a platform that openly embraces integration with the third party products you undoubtedly have and furthermore, adds them to the telemetry and visibility that gives a multiplier effect to your security architecture.
I firmly believe that Cisco have the best offering in the market and with the continued innovation and acquisitions such as Splunk and Isovalent, the future of this space is looking more secure than ever. Let alone with the launch of Hyper Shield!
