Cloud Security
Cisco | September 15, 2023
Cisco Secure Application, new to the Cisco Full-Stack Observability Platform, brings application and security teams together to secure cloud-native application development and deployment.
The platform integrates Cisco's industry-leading security products' security intelligence with application performance data to provide business context with security findings.
Cisco-exclusive business risk observability enables IT professionals to identify, assess, and prioritize risk and fix application security concerns based on potential business impact.
Cisco, a worldwide technology leader that offers innovative software-defined networking, cloud, and security solutions, has unveiled the availability of the Cisco Secure Application, formerly known as Security Insights for Cloud Native Application Observability, on the Cisco Full-Stack Observability platform. This integration empowers organizations to seamlessly unite their application and security teams, facilitating the secure development and deployment of modern applications. The latest release of Cisco Secure Application extends its capabilities to securely manage both cloud-native and hybrid applications.
In an effort to assist organizations in bolstering their cloud-native applications security, Cisco has introduced the new Cisco Secure Application offering, which is available on Cisco's recently introduced Full-Stack Observability platform. This solution equips customers with enhanced visibility and intelligent insights regarding business risk in various cloud environments.
As a result, businesses gain the ability to more effectively prioritize and respond to security risks that could impact revenue and reputation in real time, leading to a reduction in overall organizational risk profiles.
As organizations strive to provide smooth digital experiences, IT teams have faced growing demands to transition to modern, distributed applications.
According to a recent study by Cisco, 92% of global technologists acknowledge that the urgency to innovate and adapt to evolving customer needs has often resulted in compromised application security during software development.
As a consequence, organizations have become susceptible to security vulnerabilities and threats. They face broader attack surfaces and gaps in their application security layer due to the isolation of teams. These teams face challenges in obtaining adequate visibility and the necessary business context for prioritizing vulnerabilities. Consequently, organizations are witnessing a surge in security incidents within the modern environment, thereby jeopardizing customer data and the reputation of their businesses.
Mark Leary, Research Director, IDC, stated,
Cisco's extensive domain experience across multi-cloud and hybrid environments and comprehensive full tech stack oversight positions the company well to assist customers bring business risk observability, application observability, and security intelligence data together. Combined, they give customers access to the critical information they need to make smarter decisions about their application security
[Source – Cision PR Newswire]
Senior VP and General Manager of Cisco Full-Stack Observability and AppDynamics, Ronak Desai, said,
An organization's ability to swiftly assess risks based on potential business impact, align teams and triage threats is entirely dependent on understanding where vulnerabilities exist, the severity of those risks, the likelihood they’ll be exploited, and the risk to the business of each issue. This business risk observability can enable IT professionals understand and prioritize those risks and is uniquely delivered by Cisco. The availability of Cisco Secure Application on the Cisco Full-Stack Observability platform is a crucial next step in our commitment to providing customers with the tools they need to provide unmatched and secure digital experiences across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
[Source – Cision PR Newswire]
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Enterprise Security
OpenAI | September 07, 2023
OpenAI unveils ChatGPT Enterprise, which provides businesses with enterprise-grade advanced capabilities.
ChatGPT Enterprise offers a brand-new administrator portal with tools to manage how employees utilize ChatGPT within an organization.
The launch of ChatGPT Enterprise coincides with intensifying competition in the chatbot domain with companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic.
According to OpenAI, artificial intelligence can enhance numerous aspects of professional lives and increase team creativity and productivity. This represents an important milestone in the development of an AI assistant for the workplace that can help with any task, which is tailored to business needs and protects sensitive information.
OpenAI, an industry-leading AI research and deployment organization that conducts research and implements machine learning (ML), announced the introduction of ChatGPT Enterprise. The latest product offers enterprise-grade protection and privacy, extended context windows for processing longer inputs, limitless higher-speed GPT-4 access, customization possibilities, additional data analysis capabilities, and much more.
ChatGPT Enterprise introduces an all-new admin portal equipped with essential tools for managing and controlling ChatGPT's usage within a company. These tools include domain verification integrations, single sign-on integrations, and a user-friendly dashboard packed with usage statistics. Employees can leverage ChatGPT to streamline internal processes and construct internal workflow through easily shareable discussion templates. Additionally, businesses have the option to tailor ChatGPT-powered solutions to their specific needs by utilizing credits on OpenAI's API platform.
OpenAI’s latest product grants users unrestricted access to an advanced data analysis feature previously known as Code Interpreter. This capability empowers ChatGPT to proficiently analyze data, solve mathematical problems, create charts, and perform a range of other tasks.
Both ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise operate on the powerful GPT-4, OpenAI's cutting-edge AI model. However, ChatGPT Enterprise customers enjoy priority access to GPT-4, which boasts twice the speed of the standard GPT-4 model and an expanded context window that accommodates up to 32,000 tokens, equivalent to approximately 25,000 words.
The introduction of ChatGPT Enterprise overlaps with intensifying competition in the chatbot sector. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic are engaged in an intense AI arms competition. In addition to releasing new chatbot applications, their objective is to introduce innovative features that encourage the widespread adoption of generative AI in daily operations.
Google and Microsoft, for example, are continuously refining their respective Bard and Bing chatbots with innovative features such as visual search. In the meantime, Anthropic, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI executives, has made a splash with its AI chatbot, Claude 2.
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Network Threat Detection
iTWire | October 30, 2023
Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader driving the convergence of networking and security, has announced the expansion of its Universal SASE offering to empower today’s hybrid workforce with FortiOS everywhere.
Ken Xie, founder, chairman of the board, and chief executive officer, said, The Fortinet operating system, FortiOS, is the industry’s only enterprise-grade converged operating system able to support all secure access service edge (SASE) functions, including firewall, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), secure web gateway, encryption/decryption, cloud access security broker (CASB), data loss prevention (DLP), and zero trust network access (ZTNA), whether deployed in an appliance or cloud-delivered from Fortinet.
“This approach enables over 30 converged networking and security functions to be managed through a single console. Fourteen of these functions are accelerated when deployed on our new FortiASIC Security Processor 5-based FortiGate 120G SASE appliance.”
Expanding Fortinet Universal SASE
Single-vendor SASE provides flexible access to critical resources and applications for users and devices. However, most enterprises rely on different vendors for each SASE function, which introduces significant challenges of controlling different operating system functionality and management consoles. Fortinet Universal SASE takes traditional single-vendor SASE one step further, providing consistent policies and controls on-prem and in the cloud while delivering seamless integration across all functions and deployments to better support today’s hybrid workforce while reducing information technology (IT) overhead.
FortiOS runs the full SASE stack, including a bi-directional firewall, SD-WAN, secure web gateway, encryption/decryption, CASB, DLP, and ZTNA. It also has the flexibility to run on an appliance in accelerated mode as well as in the FortiSASE cloud, providing consistent networking, security, and policy management for every edge. This is further enhanced by FortiGuard artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security services, such as intrusion prevention system (IPS), domain name system (DNS) filtering, URL filtering, anti-malware, sandboxing, and more.
This news expands Fortinet’s investment in Universal SASE by expanding the reach of its SASE stack in three key areas of the portfolio:
Worldwide coverage of FortiSASE cloud locations
FortiSASE, built on a global, scalable cloud network, delivers the same SASE stack as FortiGate appliances through its regional FortiSASE cloud locations. To deliver the best user experience and higher service availability, Fortinet now delivers over 100 FortiSASE cloud locations globally.
Bringing accelerated SASE to the campus and branch
To bring the full SASE stack to campus and branch locations, Fortinet is announcing the new FortiGate 120G SASE appliance. Because it is powered by Fortinet’s patented security processor 5 (SP5) custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), it can accelerate many elements of the SASE stack, such as delivering three gigabits per second (Gbps) of secure sockets layer (SSL) inspection—an average of six times faster than the industry average—for visibility into encrypted traffic at scale. The following Secure Compute Rating table provides a comparison between equivalent solutions:
Flexible consumption extended to Universal SASE
FortiFlex, Fortinet’s flexible consumption program, has now been extended to Fortinet Universal SASE solutions. The entire SASE stack from Fortinet can be consumed as part of FortiFlex, whether customers want to use on-prem or FortiSASE cloud-based services. FortiFlex offers usage-based licensing across cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises deployments to give IT teams the flexibility to continually right-size their deployments, reduce excessive procurement cycles for new security solutions, simplify the deployment and provisioning of new services, and maximise budget and return on investment by enabling IT teams to scale down or pause services as needed.
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