SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Addressing the increased business priority of data and application protection in the network, Cisco Systems, Inc., announced 12 additions to its comprehensive security strategy. These solutions, including new routing platforms and security services, deliver advanced protection to customers, and support business and productivity growth. Cisco's security strategy is to embed security throughout the network and integrate security services in all its products, making it a transparent, scalable, and manageable aspect of any business infrastructure. Cisco offers customers a simplified and scalable migration path to deliver secure connectivity for Internet Protocol (IP) services. Along with the best-practices network design guidelines known as the SAFE Blueprint, Cisco's approach offers state-of-the-art layered protection of business-critical processes from internal and external threats. "Effective information security is ultimately dependent on combating the long-acknowledged threats that come from within the enterprise," said Mark Bouchard, Senior Program Director, META Group. "Taking advantage of security services that are embedded and integrated with the computing infrastructure itself, such as those being offered by Cisco, is an efficient and appropriate component of a solution to this challenge." Cisco's strategy is being reinforced today with a wide range of enhancements in key security technologies:

-- Secure Connectivity: Cisco introduced several new routing platforms and security services spanning enterprise to small businesses. These include additions to the Cisco 800 Series and SOHO 90 Series secure broadband routers, which extend enterprise-class advanced IP services, including security features for data, voice and video, to small offices and teleworkers. Cisco also announced new virtual private network (VPN) acceleration modules for the Cisco 2691,3660, and 3700 series routers that are designed to increase branch-office VPN performance while simultaneously decreasing CPU utilization by half. Customers will benefit from an up to 10 times performance improvement in IP voice-and video-enabled VPNs in remote-office environments. These modules provide among the industry's first hardware-accelerated Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) solutions. These solutions utilize Cisco IOS(R) Software advancements in integrating network and security features to create new options for converged data, voice, and video network deployments. These Cisco IOS Software extensions also deliver enhanced quality of service (QoS), resiliency, scalability and encryption for VPNs, while simplifying deployment and administration. To address the secure connectivity requirements of data centers, Cisco also introduced the Cisco SCA 11000 Series Secure Content Accelerator II (SCA II), a dedicated appliance that offloads Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) processing from back-end Web servers while simplifying certificate management. SCA II extends the existing Cisco SSL portfolio, which includes switch-integrated and dedicated SSL appliance solutions and is designed for customers seeking transaction security while maintaining peak web server performance. -- Extended Perimeter Security and Intrusion Detection: New Cisco IOS Software Inline Stateful Firewall and Intrusion Detection capabilities provide enhanced performance, improved support for voice and video over IP protocols (Session Initiation Protocol [SIP], Cisco Skinny Client Control Protocol), 42 additional intrusion detection system (IDS) signatures and enhanced authentication. These new capabilities and dozens of others added during the past 18 months expand Cisco IOS Software security functions, providing customers an additional line of defense within the network. It makes Cisco IOS Software an ideal foundation to deliver integrated network security to companies of all sizes. -- Identity Services and Security Management: The new Cisco Identity-Based Networking Services (IBNS) is an integrated software-based solution that offers greater flexibility and secure mobility for geographically dispersed users. Through extensions to the IEEE 802.1x security architecture for wired and wireless authentication, customers now have more granular network access control when deployed in conjunction with Cisco products, including the Cisco Access Control Server (ACS), switches, routers, and wireless access points. IBNS combines authentication, access control, and user policies and helps enterprises cost-effectively manage user mobility and security policies. This optimizes the management function of large-scale network resources, increases user productivity, and reduces operating expenses. Cisco also announced its Hosting Solution Engine (HSE) Version 1.7, an industry-leading turnkey solution for secure management of data-center environments. It is designed to enable individual groups within an organization to autonomously perform daily management tasks on a shared network infrastructure. Cisco HSE 1.7 includes new configuration, performance monitoring and reporting support for the broad Cisco portfolio of content networking solutions, and the Cisco PIX(R) firewall family.

The integration of routing, IP services and security provides a foundation for companies to evolve their applications and services. Customers' mission-critical business information and systems must be both protected and accessible. To address these requirements, Cisco announced the extension of its broad portfolio of routing platforms and software for secure IP services. For small, remote offices and teleworker environments, the new Cisco 831 Ethernet Broadband and 837 ADSL Broadband routers, along with the Cisco SOHO 91 Ethernet Broadband and SOHO 97 ADSL Broadband routers deliver high performance and cost-effective, reliable connectivity. The Cisco 831 and 837 routers offer integrated stateful firewall and VPN capabilities, along with hardware-accelerated encryption and management to securely and reliably deliver advanced high-quality data, voice and video services. The Cisco SOHO 91 and 97 broadband routers provide easy-to-use, secure access for small offices. Ideally suited for broadband environments, they offer integrated stateful firewall and VPN as well as advanced management functionality that is designed to significantly reduce the cost of ownership. Cisco routing platforms support new advanced security services within Cisco IOS Software that are integrated with IP network services to deliver toll-quality IP voice-and video-enabled VPNs. These services include enhanced QoS functionality, advanced on-demand meshing capability and IP Security (IPSec) stateful failover support for improved voice availability over VPNs. Additional Cisco IOS Software services for IPSec include integrated AES support and new Network Address Translation (NAT) transparency capabilities for improved intra-network interoperability. Cisco Systems Inc.