Rackspace, the Texas-headquartered cloud computing company, announced last week it was deploying 22,000 of Cisco’s Next-Generation Firewalls to integrate into their existing services, helping its customers better manage their hosted environments with greater security and efficiency.
Organizations are increasingly turning to the cloud to store their data, citing ease of use, scalability and improved data security. However, adversaries are also increasingly weaponizing cloud services; according to the 2018 Cisco Annual Cybersecurity Report, networks are at risk of attack by malware that has reached “unprecedented levels of sophistication and impact”. Thus moving dynamic workloads to the cloud can come with the risk of creating new threats.
“The cloud is the future of IT for all businesses, but for many companies, the journey to the cloud can be a challenge,” said Brian Kelly, Chief Security Officer, Rackspace. “One of the biggest hurdles and concerns for these companies is security – customers want to know that their data is protected with the most up-to-date and innovative technologies, even as their cloud needs evolve. Through our close collaboration with Cisco in threat protection, we are committed to helping secure our clients’ evolving and expanding journey to the cloud.”
Rackspace has long been a Cisco Security customer and is one of its largest firewall customers. The company has a unique relationship with Cisco in which the two regularly collaborate to develop and trial new security technologies and solutions. Rackspace served as a testing partner for Cisco’s stateful firewall, the ASA series, followed by the ASA 5500-X Series, and now the current iteration of Cisco’s Firepower Next-Generation Firewalls for advanced threat protection.
“Rackspace has tested and deployed many of our leading-edge security solutions, from early firewalls to Firepower, and we are grateful for their partnership in our ongoing efforts to make customers’ journey to the cloud a safe one,” said Shawn Henry, Cisco Security VP/GM.
Cisco says its firewall is the industry’s first fully integrated and threat-focused next-generation firewall, which has a number of benefits:
- Prevents more threats – known and unknown;
- Offers more control over the users, applications, devices, threats, and vulnerabilities in the network;
- Reduces malware time to detection from months to hours, thereby enabling quicker remediation solutions
- Simplifies operations by uniting all security functions into one purpose-built management interface
- Offers enterprises an unparalleled level of customization
“Today’s attacks are multivector. Customers need to have multiple layers of defense to combat sophisticated attacks, and Cisco brings an integrated architectural advantage to the market,” said David Ulevitch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group. “Cisco is committed to helping protect and secure our longtime partner Rackspace and its customers’ cloud environments.”