Cisco Boosts MSP Security with New Platform Upgrades
▼ Summary
– Cisco has enhanced its Security Cloud Control platform with multi-customer management capabilities to help MSPs deliver security services more effectively.
– The platform integrates AIOps and AgenticOps to centrally manage security solutions like the Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Secure Access.
– The Hybrid Mesh Firewall provides distributed security to block advanced threats, protect against vulnerabilities, and enable zero-trust segmentation across various environments.
– Security Cloud Control includes features such as centralized oversight, multi-org management, and granular RBAC to streamline operations and reduce costs for MSPs.
– These advancements aim to accelerate MSPs’ time-to-market, lower operational expenses, and improve profitability through unified management and automation.
Cisco has rolled out substantial upgrades to its platform, specifically designed to empower managed service providers (MSPs) with enhanced security service delivery. The latest enhancements introduce foundational multi-customer management features within Security Cloud Control, Cisco’s unified, AI-driven management console. This platform utilizes advanced AIOps and AgenticOps, allowing organizations to centrally oversee a complete range of security solutions, including the Hybrid Mesh Firewall with AI Defense and Secure Access, Cisco’s security service edge (SSE) solution.
By consolidating these tools into Security Cloud Control, Cisco aims to simplify operations for MSPs, helping them overcome fragmentation, lower operating expenses, and support accelerated, sustainable business growth. According to Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, “MSPs are on the front lines, helping businesses navigate the complexities of modern cybersecurity, especially as AI makes threats more sophisticated. The new multi-customer management capabilities in Cisco Security Cloud Control, coupled with our Hybrid Mesh Firewall, are designed to eliminate operational friction, empower our partners to accelerate revenue growth, and ultimately deliver superior security outcomes for their customers.”
The Hybrid Mesh Firewall functions as a distributed security solution, built to block sophisticated threats, protect against vulnerabilities, including those affecting AI models, and enable zero-trust segmentation across data centers, cloud environments, and edge locations. It uses network and workload identities to establish micro-perimeters, applying segmentation and AI-driven threat protection at the application edge and within workloads. This hyper-distributed security model lets organizations define and enforce policies consistently across Cisco firewalls, Smart Switches, workload agents using eBPF, and even third-party firewalls. All policies are managed centrally via Security Cloud Control, with telemetry integrating seamlessly with Splunk.
With built-in support for multi-customer management now extended to the Hybrid Mesh Firewall, MSPs can provide clients with comprehensive, advanced security solutions backed by proven effectiveness. These include the new Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series, which offers advanced on-box threat inspection and integrated SD-WAN for distributed branches, delivering up to three times better price-performance, and the Cisco Secure Firewall 6100 Series, which provides high-performance density for AI-ready data centers. In recent testing by NetSecOPEN, a nonprofit specializing in open, standardized network security testing, Cisco’s Secure Firewall Threat Defense 7.7 software detected and blocked between 99.5% and 100% of threats.
Dustin Grimmeissen, VP of Network & Security at AHEAD, commented, “Testing the Cisco Secure Firewall 1200 Series, we found remarkable stability and capability for the price. This performance allows us to help clients modernize and simplify their security architecture all within budget.”
Key capabilities within Security Cloud Control that drive results for MSPs include:
Centralized oversight and management: An intuitive Manager View offers a single pane of glass for navigating managed entities, subscriptions, and access controls, cutting administrative overhead.
Security Cloud Control for MSPs also supports faster adoption of the Hybrid Mesh Firewall, delivering smarter, centrally managed protection across all environments. This enables MSPs to achieve:
Faster time-to-market: Quickly onboard new customers and bundle multi-product services from a single platform, increasing win rates and service expansion.
Industry experts have praised these new capabilities:
- Gísli Helgason, Chief Technologist – Network & Security at CAE Technology Services Ltd., noted, “Being able to log into a single dashboard, with robust role-based access control and being able to manage multiple customers from a single place is really going to reduce the workload for our teams.”
- Justin Rice, Chief Product & Technology Officer at CBTS, added, “The announcement on Security Cloud Control’s new capabilities for managing multiple customers is going to be key for our business. It gives us a single pane of glass to manage multi-customer environments, which is really a game changer for MSPs.”
- Lucas Black, Cisco Security Services Architect at CDW Canada, observed, “We deal with 15-plus tools, platforms, and logins. Having a single view, that single platform Cisco Security Cloud Control, will give us the ability to have all of our customers’ data in one spot, and all the products and subscriptions that they have easily available to our SOC and NOC analysts.”
- Jeff Gatz, VP of Alliances at Kyndryl, stated, “Kyndryl welcomes the new multi‑customer features Cisco is bringing to Security Cloud Control. These capabilities help us simplify commercial and operational processes while accelerating innovation for our customers.”
(Source: HelpNet Security)
