RANT Roundtable in partnership with CISCO

As security leaders, we know protecting the business is difficult in a modern, complex, and scaling network environment made more difficult by rising costs and shrinking budgets.

The board’s expectations are unreasonable: demanding greater speed and innovation while mandating the adoption of automation and AI, all while businesses struggle to become resilient against security issues they are only just beginning to understand. Yet the CISO who asks for more money to try to mitigate all these new risks will often be told that they should be extracting more value from existing security investments.

Cybersecurity vendors often end up amplifying this problem by offering new tools to address new threats. But there are rare examples among them of firms who want to help without selling additional kit. One of those is Cisco, who believe they can help security leaders to get ahead of new threats not by adding yet another tool to the security stack, but by adopting a new philosophy when running existing solutions across the network, all while reducing spend, complexity and the most valuable asset of all: time!

Inevitably, they’ve given the concept a not-exactly-catchy acronym: UZTNA. It stands for universal zero-trust network access – and, if correctly and thoughtfully applied to your defences, Cisco reckon it can help get defenders ahead of some of today’s most urgent and potentially baffling threats, and allow your business to reap the benefits of generative AI without trampling on decades of diligent and effective security work.

Join a group of your senior cybersecurity leadership peers, and staff from Cisco, to… Well, to RANT about AI, obviously; but also to find out how you can pull ahead of the threats it poses without adding new tasks to your already overlong to-do list.