Cisco’s Tom Gillis On Building The ‘Security Cloud’ And New Feature Updates

What do you see as Cisco’s major advantages on SASE?

I think the real big differentiator with the current offering is the ease of use. It’s just super easy to set this up and it’s all one framework, and you don’t have to mess around with, “Oh, is the user remote, or are they on campus?” For all of that, you just turn it on and it works. The core capabilities that we have are, I would say, industry standard — URL filtering has been around for a long time. We maybe have slight advantages with our DNS-based security controls. But the magic, the thing that makes it stand out, is that ease of use and integration. Now, in the future, we have some things we’re working on that I think are highly differentiated, and so you’ll be hearing more from us on that in the Cisco Live timeframe.

So you’re saying the security and the networking sides both work together more seamlessly with your SASE platform than with platforms from other vendors?

There are vendors that do the web security that are independent of any networking device. And then there’s vendors that that have both, but they’re not as tightly integrated as ours. A lot of these customers — especially in the middle of the market — they just want it to work. So our partners are enabling that. And we make it much easier than trying to pull the other two different vendors in to get this thing to work. We have one tightly integrated solution that’s very, very easy to operationalize.

What are some other product capabilities that you’re looking at for the future?

We’re going to be talking at RSA about our XDR [extended detection and response] capability. So the ability to span all these domains and tie it together. And then we’ve got big announcements coming at Cisco Live, which is a month after.