The city in the forest-Atlanta, Georgia-extended a double dose of Southern charm to Cisco in April by awarding two prestigious information security industry awards at the 2^ndAnnual CSO40 Awards. The awards program recognizes projects and initiatives demonstrating innovative use of security in delivering outstanding business value.

Top honors went to the teams representing Cisco's Enterprise ACL Management (EACLM) and Unified Security Metrics (USM) projects. Team members included: EACLM -Mark Sullivan, Network Engineer and Oisin MacAlasdair, Technical Staff and Security Prime for networking; USM -Gerwin Tijink, Information Security (InfoSec) Architect, Hessel Heerebout, USM Program Manager, and Ranjan Jain, IT Architect and Security Prime.

Cisco has developed an EACLM tool to deliver abstraction and management of its increasingly complex global set of access-control lists (ACL). The EACLM tool not only acts as a single source of truth for all ACLs, but also greatly improves ACL accuracy, delivery, and updates-while delivering operational dividends in terms of cost savings. Automation alone has delivered a 50 percent reduction in time to execute ACL changes since the adoption of the tool, and the controls and error checking it provides have also resulted in more than 17,000 malformed access control entries (ACE) being identified and removed. This greatly improves the accuracy and reliability of ACLs in production. One of the other intangible benefits EACLM brings to Cisco is improved security brought about by having fewer service-impacting incidents.

InfoSec's global USM project was designed to give Cisco more global insight into the state of its security posture across the enterprise. USM aims to remove inconsistencies in security analysis, metrics, and communication, and to improve the transparency and enhance the information that security clients receive by providing detailed metrics on their network activity. Since launching the program 12 months ago, with enhanced measurement and reporting activities through USM, Cisco has improved its vulnerability on-time closure rate from 15% to 85%.

Receiving these accolades from our security peers is a great testament to the talented team we've assembled here at Cisco to drive our security strategy. Through their ingenuity, we continue to raise the security bar in protecting Cisco and in providing meaningful value and ROI for the business. Congratulations!