Microsoft, Cisco Shake on Network Security
100013
In a deal sure to bring smiles to the faces of enterprise security pros, Microsoft (Quote, Chart) and Cisco Systems plan to integrate technologies and push for an industry standard to power network security and health policy compliance.
707323
(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
261731
Cisco Systems and Wells Fargo found themselves this week again responding to security breaches nearly identical to ones the two companies faced only months earlier.
60336
Protego&#39;s products help enterprises of all sizes manage, monitor and eliminate network security threats. The Protego deal would augment Cisco&#39;s three cash acquisitions of security software startups this year.
98501
Cisco Systems and Microsoft have announced a collaborative effort designed to bridge a divide between their emerging network access-control architectures.
588198
IBM and Cisco Systems unveiled product updates that will link technology from the two companies more closely together to protect customer networks from security threats.
17204
Blog: News last week that Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft are working on Secure Information Sharing Architecture was an exception to the industry tendency to save the juicy stuff for September.
75711
Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. on Monday will announce a collaborative effort designed to bridge a divide between their emerging network access-control architectures.
300480
Security collaboration with Cisco will bump key network protection feature until 2007.
548521
The companies expand a security alliance to help businesses keep worms and viruses from getting onto their networks.
346455
One security firm says Vista is vulnerable to current threats; another isn't so sure.
602170
Can't parse that Sysadmins can look forward to clocking some overtime this week after Cisco warned of flaws in how its core operating system handles malformed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) traffic.â¦
207814
RSA and Cisco are jointly developing technology to embed security technology in multiple storage media, though some users still prefer to use security appliances.
417584
(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems and Microsoft will announce progress on a 2-year-old effort to link their separate technologies for network client health screening, commonly known as "network access control," according to sources familiar with the companies' plans.Â  The companies will use The Security Standard conference in Boston to unveil application program interfaces (APIs) in Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system that will allow Cisco NAC-compliant switches and routers to evaluate the security posture of Vista systems. Network access control technology allows companies to perform health checks on endpoint devices such as PCs and mobile devices before they are granted access to company networks. For example, worker PCs might be checked to make sure they are not infected with a virus, have up-to-date antivirus definitions, and a desktop firewall enabled before being allowed onto a corporate LAN. Cisco first unveiled products that support its NAC architecture in June 2004. Since then it has slowly expanded NAC support from routers to switches and introduced a NAC appliance, formerly known as "Clean Access." Microsoft's Network Admission Protection (NAP) client health screening architecture has always been linked to its upcoming desktop and server operating system releases Vista and Longhorn, both due in 2007. In the face of strong customer pressure to simplify the competing architectures, the two companies said in October, 2004 that they would integrate NAC and NAP. However, the companies have been sparing with details of the collaboration during the two-year project, prompting speculation that the promised integration was more PR than reality. On Wednesday, the companies plan to show that they have made progress, putting features into Vista that allow companies with Cisco's Secure Access Control Server (ACS), Vista desktop systems, and a Longhorn network policy server to provide security status information from the Vista Security Center directly to Cisco switches, which can then evaluate the status against network policies. Systems that violate one or more security policies can be shunted off to quarantine for remediation, according to John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner who has seen a demonstration of the system. The system will also allow companies to push out security updates, such as antivirus signatures, and actively monitor compliance, so users who turn off antivirus or firewall software after being granted access might have those programs automatically reactivated, Pescatore said. Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP integration will make it easier for companies to deploy NAC technology, because they will not need to deploy any additional software client from Cisco, as is currently required, he said. "If you're a pure Cisco network and windows environment, and you're planning to go to Vista soon, you don't have to spend a lot of money," he said. However, the benefits of integrated NAC and NAP are at least a year away, as companies will have to wait for the delivery of Longhorn server and widespread adoption of Vista on enterprise desktops, according to Pescatore. "I think it's a 1990s announcement," said Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "They're treating the symptom but not the disease. Users want open solutions that support Linux clients and wireless and any kind of switch or router," he said. The integration between Microsoft and Cisco, while good for those companies, will hinder open standards efforts like the Trusted Computing Group's Trusted Network Connect (TNC) standard, Oltsik said. "I wish I had the money [Cisco and Microsoft] spent on this to get nothing," he said. "This is a big step back for client security."
190113
Competitors are publicly happy about Computer Associate&#39;s (Quote, Chart) $430 million acquisition of Netegrity (Quote, Chart), but there might be a hint of trepidation over the combination of the two security software players.
402159
Perfigo's products will fit into Cisco's security architecture that combines virus scanning with network policing.
210646
Cisco and IBM said they are working together to improve systems management for network carriers by combing Tivoli management software with Cisco's Active Network Abstraction technology.