In the pursuit of better security outcomes, organizations have relied on an ever-increasing number of products and services. This proliferation of point solutions, which generally solves one or two problems, has led to growth in cost and complexity. On average, enterprise customers use as many as 76 unique security solutions.

Another result of the proliferation of tools that leads to complexity are pricing and metering. Every new solution has its own pricing model, unique SLA and a plethora of mechanisms to measure consumption and usage. This complexity makes it very difficult for security teams, IT and procurement to control costs, to understand what they are paying for, set clear budgets, and communicate with internal stakeholders.

To achieve these objectives, customers are moving to consolidate vendors. Over the last few years, more companies are looking to reduce the number of solution providers, increasing from 29% of customers actively seeking to consolidate to over 70%. While vendor consolidation will help reduce complexity and lower overhead, there is still a need to simplify the way customers budget and plan security purchases.

Cisco is changing the way you can purchase security solutions

To help reduce the complexity of purchasing security solutions, Cisco has made available three suites to comprehensively protect and help organizations focus on outcomes and not purchasing technology. With the release of Cisco Security Suites -User Protection, Breach Protection and Cloud Protection -customers can acquire solutions that are designed to improve efficacy, deliver better experiences and help boost ROI.

A key pain point expressed by our customers is that their teams are spending unnecessary time managing the many security solutions. The release of these suites brings to the market not only strong security problems that solve top use cases, but also simplification and innovation in pricing and metering, helping customers improve their return on investment and reduce time spent on managing multiple solutions.

These innovations are foundational to the promise of security simplification and delivering value through a platform approach. By simplifying the way organizations can buy and consume technology, customers can accelerate time to value, reduce total cost of ownership and free up resources dedicated to managing vendors to focus on protecting their organization.

Cisco's new security suites reduce much of this complexity by bringing to market 2 pricing models, with consistent metering across all tiers. This simplified approach to pricing helps customers clearly understand their coverage needs and in return, makes budgeting easier and cost allocations more predictable.

Pricing Per User

Most organizations know how many employees or users they need to protect. However, the technologies that protect these users are often sold by many difficult to predict and measure meters: some technologies are sold by devices, by data flows, or by billing entities. Cisco simplified the consumption of these technologies: to protect users, only the number of users should matter. Both User and Breach protection can be bought using a simple count of users, and it's as simple as one license per user. There is no longer a need to measure devices, flows or other cumbersome metrics that are hard to define, predict, and track.

This approach reduces the complexity of having to define different types of use cases, multiple metrics or complex requirements to achieve the consistency necessary to achieve the right level of protection.

Pricing Per Workload

For organizations looking to protect their hybrid cloud infrastructure, Cisco is making it easier to buy the right level of protection. Cloud protection pricing and metering is done per workload, which is a virtual machine. Organizations that have more complicated infrastructures with serverless function and Kubernetes nodes can use a simple conversion to purchase the right workload quantities:

1)         Virtual machines (one workload)

2)         Container nodes (5 workloads)

3)         Serverless functions (1/5 of a workload)

Currently in the industry, these technologies are purchased with a broad range of meters: gateway hours, billing entities, devices, virtual machines, and users. Simplifying by one meter significantly reduces the complexity and allows customers to have a predictable metric for estimate how much they will need to purchase over the coming years.

Extending the promise of simplicity

In closing, customers need a simple way to buy and consume what they need, and Cisco is delivering on this promise. The Security suites are easier to buy, and estimating future needs is significantly simplified. Furthermore, the suites will be available for purchase on EA 3.0 and additional products and services, like customer support, can be easily added to a single agreement and buying motion.

Buying security products should not be an additional layer of complexity for organizations looking to improve their security posture. Having clear and predictable mechanisms to budget, plan and purchase security products is paramount in reducing costs and overhead. Cisco is consistently looking for ways to deliver value without adding complexity and we are excited to bring these new tools to market.

Call to Action

Learn more about Cisco Security Suites by viewing the Virtual Cisco Security Summit: Efficacy Above All

Resource

Panseer 2022 Security Leaders Peer Report

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