When I look back at all the chances I have taken in my life -moving to New York City out of college having never visited prior, to leaving that career with no direction of what was next, to joining Cisco back in 2012 having no technology background whatsoever. I ask myself what gave me the strength and resolve to do so (after I ask myself was I crazy), and the overwhelming response is that I have always had a strong support system.  My parents packed me up and drove me from North Carolina to New York, and they also packed me up and drove me from New York back to North Carolina.  My husband and my friends helped me formulate my plan, provided me with sound advice and lent their shoulders to lean on when I took the leap of faith to come to Cisco.  Without any of these people, I would not be here today.

The same can be said for our customers and partners as they work to differentiate themselves in an ever-increasing competitive market.  Those who want to set themselves apart must be innovative, provide an amazing customer experience, but also insure a high level of security at the same time.

According to Steve Martino, SVP and CISO for Cisco; "Companies need to balance security vs business risk, and user experience. Once you have that balance, you need a program that applies defense with an active response for when things go wrong. Human error is a reality and there's a multi-billion dollar cybercrime industry today that bets on it. You need to plan for that error and be able to respond quickly when it happens. Every day we find successful attempts to defeat our security defenses due to human error, or dedicated bad actors targeting our assets, or to software vulnerabilities; and every day we validate that our active detection and responses are finding and containing these attacks. That's how I know we have a fully functional security program.."

When you have a strong incident response plan in place, you are able to take bigger risks, but where do you start if you don't have a plan?

Cisco Incident Response Service

You need proactive plans to help you prepare, and expertise to coordinate and carry out a response.  Cisco's Incident Response Service provides everything a business needs to develop, implement, and manage the plan, including the option of setting up a flexible retainer to provide proactive and emergency defense services.  An elite team of experts is available and ready to respond within four hours, and they can be traveling to your site within 24 hours.

Cisco Talos is the world's largest threat intelligence service, to back up the response team.  This is combined with the full Cisco portfolio, including AMP for Endpoints, Umbrella, and ThreatGrid.  These tools not only protect against exploits, but can also identify and trace attempts and breaches across the network.  Follow Talos here! (they have a great podcast called Beers with Talos).

With all of this, the customer receives the benefit of a stronger security posture through a robust and resilient SOC environment.  This results in a savings of money and reputation and can get a business back to normal operations quickly after a breach.  This solution also works with the existing security infrastructure.

When I came into Cisco, the smartest thing I ever did was partner with people who were smarter than me and could support my learning as I have grown in this career.  The same can be said for our customers -the smartest ones are the ones that realize they can't do this on their own and reach out to trusted advisors for help.  Hopefully, Cisco's Incident Response Service can be included in that plan.

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