Scott Manson, the Cyber Security Leader for Middle East and Turkey at Cisco, speaks to Channel Post about his company’s plans for 2017
How has 2016 been for your company and business?
Cisco’s total global revenue for the Fiscal year 2015 was $49.2 billion.
What were your major achievements in the year 2016?
In the past year, Cisco has closed the acquisitions of CloudLock (will build on Cisco’s Security Everywhere strategy, designed to provide protection from the cloud to the network to the endpoint – offering the industry’s broadest cloud security protection for users, applications, and data), Lancope (With Lancope, Cisco’s portfolio of security solutions adds an additional capability of network behavior analytics that extends protection further into the network) and OpenDNS (will boost Cisco’s Security Everywhere approach by adding broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform).
With threat-centric security, not only does Cisco block more attacks outright than anyone else, but they also have the technology to detect the most advanced threats that can potentially evade defenses – faster than anyone else. Cisco’s median time to detection (TTD) continues to outpace the industry from the industry average of 100 days to 13 hours. Cisco is more effective than anyone else in both blocking attacks initially and detecting the most advance threats that may get past initial defenses.
How do you foresee opportunities for 2017?
The massive use of social media, the adoption of BYOD, the rise of Big Data and tracking technologies, or the promises of IoT are all raising concern about privacy. They bring a lot of new challenges to protect people’s privacy. For instance, we can name a few of the technologies that are proposed after years of research.
There is the Fully homomorphic encryption Scheme that allows computations to be carried out in a secure way, thus allowing chaining services without exposing people’s data. There is Differential Privacy which aims to provide means to maximize the accuracy of queries from statistical databases while minimising the chances of identifying its records, thus protecting data. In the same spirit, secure multi-party computation aims to distribute computation power while preserving data privacy. There are also technologies developed in Cryptocurrency which would allow users to pay anonymously.
More vastly, there is a growing field in the trend of security and privacy. The number of devices on internet exploded over the few last year, and there is a great need now to secure the communication between all this smart devices.
We expect privacy concerns to continue to rise. As we interconnect more things, governments and enterprises will collect a rapidly growing amount of data about consumers such as medical records, vehicle driving patterns, and application usage statistics.
In addition, biometric technologies are fast-developing for identification or security management. Today, there are mostly three technics that have proven working: identification based on fingerprints, iris or retina, and face. Recent researches try to bring a fourth one: identification based on electrocardiogram (ECG). It’s called “ECG based biometric identity management”.
Finally, the massive adoption of smart devices have opened new business opportunities in the area of physical personal security.
What sort of trends do you foresee for 2017 and how are you as a company ready to tackle opportunities and challenges for the year ahead?
More things are being connected to address a growing range of business needs. In fact, by 2020, more than 50 billion things will connect to the Internet—seven times our human population. Examples are wearable health and performance monitors, connected vehicles, smart grids, connected oil rigs, and connected manufacturing. The race to connect the unconnected will continue, enabling the Internet of Things (IoT) where billions of sensors are changing the way we live our lives. This Internet of Things (IoT) will revolutionize the way we work, live, play, and learn. The development of products that support IP, Ethernet, or Wi-Fi interfaces is accelerating, and as we connect those devices to the Internet, opening the door to new use cases and business models.
The Internet of Things and other emerging technologies are going to require even more security. IoT in both the consumer and B2B market will continue to accelerate, connecting data, things, processes and people. Intelligent systems will grow rapidly in 2017, as more applications and products are made available. Wearable devices will continue to grow and mesh with healthcare and big data. Security in the IoT environment is will naturally become more challenging and complicated.
Inadequate security will be a critical barrier to large-scale deployment of IoT systems and broad customer adoption of IoT applications. Simply extending existing IT security architectures to the IoT will not be sufficient. The IoT world requires new security approaches, creating fertile ground for innovative and disruptive thinking and solutions.
Unlike computers in today’s Internet, many connected things in the future will have highly constrained resources that can’t be easily or cost-effectively upgraded. Yet we still need to adequately protect these things over a very long lifespan. This increases the importance of cloud-based security services—with resource-efficient, thing-to-cloud interactions.
With the growth of IoT, we’re shifting toward a cyber-physical paradigm. This is where we closely integrate computing and communication with the connected things, including the ability to control their operations. In such systems, many security vulnerabilities and threats come from the interactions between the cyber and physical domains. An approach to holistically integrate security vulnerability analysis and protections in both domains will become increasingly necessary.
Smaller IoT deployments, like in connected homes, are still suffering from interoperability issues and lack of consumer confidence in terms of security and privacy. Going forward, we will likely see companies focus less on trying to become the standard de-facto platform, and more on developing complementary solutions that align with others.
This interoperability will allow consumers to more easily build complete secure systems that fit their needs—like combining camera, movement sensors, automation for lights, blinds, smart home appliances and even proactive energy management. The faster we overcome interoperability, security and privacy challenges, the quicker we will be able to enjoy fantastic applications that fully unleash the power of IoT.
