Cisco Tetration Analytics secures business applications and delivers new deployment options

Cisco announces that Cisco Tetration Analytics^TM now automates policy enforcement, enabling organizations to build secure environments for their business applications and also expands Tetration with new deployment options. Building on Tetration’s original discovery and visibility capabilities, Cisco’s latest software for Tetration Analytics now provides the industry’s first consistent security policy enforcement applied holistically across each application. Policy is enforced regardless of where the application resides: virtual, bare metal, physical servers, or in private or public clouds, across any vendor’s infrastructure. This new enforcement model binds policies to workload characteristics and behaviors while ensuring that the policy stays intact even as the workload moves.

“Enterprises worldwide are adopting multi-cloud strategies to realize their objectives for digital transformation, but these present ongoing challenges related to visibility and security. Although 80 percent of security spending is focused on the perimeter, only 20 percent of the breaches occur there. IT organizations are often under siege by a mix of elevated expectations and a rising tide of security threats, not to mention the need to show ongoing improvements in operational efficiencies,” said Osama Al-Zoubi, Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Middle East. “Cisco Tetration Analytics addresses these challenges through pervasive visibility and application segmentation, which is designed to bolster security-policy enforcement across hybrid application environments.”

Complex Applications Challenge Security 

Today’s complex business applications often span hundreds of servers residing on a wide array of heterogeneous infrastructure, both in the data center and in the cloud. This complexity is further compounded by virtualization technologies, application mobility and constant application changes due to modern DevOps environments. As a result, IT managers are challenged to understand an application’s components, their communication pattern and dependencies – all necessary to meet security requirements for modern applications.

Enhanced Security Through Application Segmentation

Tetration Analytics takes micro-segmentation– a security technique enabling workload separation – a leap further by delivering “application segmentation”, which consistently drives policies across the application layer, regardless of where the application resides: virtualized, bare metal, physical servers, or in the cloud. Policies can be pushed to any vendor’s firewall, and can be orchestrated at the network layer as well. Compared to static legacy solutions, Tetration provides actionable results dynamically based on behavior analysis of billions of flows, processes, and workload characteristics. Consistent policy is enforced through the workload agent for any workload, anywhere.

New Tetration Deployment Options

Cisco is also delivering two new deployment models for Tetration Analytics. In addition to the original large scale platform, Cisco now offers a new smaller-scale platform, Tetration-M, suitable for deployments up to 1,000 workloads. Cisco is also introducing a new cloud appliance with software deployed in the public cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Tetration Cloud – also suitable for deployments up to 1000 workloads. Regardless of the deployment model, Tetration can monitor workloads in private as well as public clouds.

Platform Extensibility Through APIs and Apps

Tetration Analytics now enables customers and ecosystem partners the ability to write their own applications that access data stored on the platform. Users can bring their own analytics algorithms to Tetration to create apps that generate customized data exports and notifications in open formats specific to their business needs. Cisco is continuing its tradition of open ecosystems by working with partner companies to build applications and integrations with their solutions: AlgoSec, Citrix, Dell EMC, F5, Infoblox, ServiceNow, and Tufin.

Cisco ASAP Data Center

Tetration Analytics is a key part of Cisco’s strategy to help enable digital transformation, which starts with a Cisco® ASAP data center. ASAP stands for Analyze, Simplify, Automate, and Protect. This architectural approach enables organizations to modernize their data center and IT infrastructure with a hybrid IT solution that maximizes application performance, mitigates risk, and increases operational agility in support of digital transformation. Cisco’s comprehensive data center portfolio underscores its commitment to innovation: Cisco Nexus ® 9000 switches, Cisco ACI™, CloudCenter, Tetration Analytics, Cisco UCS®, and HyperFlex.

About Tetration Analytics

Tetration Analytics is designed to help organizations gain complete visibility across everything in the data center in real time – every packet, every flow, and every speed. Tetration gathers telemetry from software and hardware sensors and analyzes the information using advanced data center analytics and machine learning to provide IT managers with a deep understanding of the data center. Through a single pane of glass, security policies are automated and enforced based on context and roles. Tetration simplifies operational reliability, zero-trust operations and application migrations to SDN solutions and the cloud.

With Cisco Tetration Analytics, organizations can:

• Understand application dependencies throughout their data center and in the cloud
• Move from reactive to proactive: make informed operational decisions and validate the effect of policy changes before they are implemented
• Search billions of flows instantly using Tetration’s forensics search engine and user interface
• Continuously monitor application behavior, quickly identifying deviations in communication patterns
• Enforce consistent security policies across each application, regardless of where it resides

The Tetration platform is a “one-touch” appliance: the servers and switches are prewired and the software is pre-installed. Setting up Tetration is easy: answering a few questions about the data center environment allows the Cluster to be configured. The big data complexity is hidden- no special big data expertise is needed to deploy or operate Tetration.

Cisco Advanced Services

Cisco Services experts can help organizations to rapidly integrate Tetration Analytics in their data centers, define use cases specific to their environment, and deploy validated application segmentation policies.  Cisco Services expertise can help organizations to gain even faster time to value, and in addition provides 24/7 global solution expertise for centralized issue management and solution-wide support in a single service.