Cisco?s Path to Secure Cloud Enablement

Posted by Lauren Ellis on September 16th, 2014

With a seemingly nonstop feed of menacing headlines announcing corporate data breaches, it is becoming impossible for IT departments to maintain a “head in the sand” attitude towards security vulnerabilities.

“If you are the head of security, the first thing you’ve got to realize is that the bad news is not going to get better,” said John Stewart, Senior VP and Chief Security Officer at Cisco.

To address the reality of unsanctioned cloud usage, Stewart advocates for taking the emotion out of security with a data-driven approach. Cisco selected Skyhigh to provide data visibility as a first step toward securing their cloud.

Data-Driven IT Security
From there, Stewart was able to see what cloud security services employees liked and how they used those services. The end-goal was to implement a frictionless security infrastructure that would allow users to leverage the cloud to collaborate and increase productivity.

“I have a quote, ‘Good design is beautiful, but great design is invisible’,” Stewart said. “I look up to that as security that makes users happy and doesn’t do anything other than make their day-to-day life get better.”


Author :
Lauren Ellis is a research analyst covering the technology industry’s top trends & topics, focusing on Cloud Security, Cloud Computing, Data Loss Prevention etc.,