I just returned from a super exciting AWS re:Invent 2022 conference more convinced than ever about how the "One Team" we've assembled - Cisco + AWS + Our Partners - is on target to solve our mutual customers' most pressing challenges together. Our customers are looking to us to help them realize their strategic priorities, navigate the economic landscape, and innovate like never before. They rely on us to help them keep their applications, workloads, and data secure from bad actors. They're also asking us about sustainability. Cisco is committed to net zero by 2040 across the value chain - including products, operations, and supply chain - and Amazon is on a path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, while also achieving net-zero carbon by 2040.

What is One Team, you ask? It starts with the longstanding strategic partnership between Cisco and AWS. Many of our customers are the same, and many operate today across on-premises and public-cloud environments. These mutual customers need help to securely, rapidly, and consistently connect remote users, distributed teams, applications, workloads, and data across their hybrid environments, which falls right into the Cisco + AWS joint value proposition.

However, meeting specific customer outcomes often requires additional services and capabilities. This is where our partners add unique value as core members of the One Team.

Cisco and AWS share many of the same partners, all who are experts in helping our mutual customers complete the journey to optimally and securely operate hybrid cloud environments. Our combined treasure chest of technology and services enables us to be laser-focused on helping our mutual customers deliver exceptional experiences that meet or exceed their outcome objectives, all while running in hybrid cloud environments.

Speaking of technology, at this year's re:Invent conference, Cisco made four very exciting AWS integration announcements.

Amazon Security Lake with Cisco Secure Firewall

Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes security data from cloud, on-premises, and custom sources into a purpose-built data lake stored in a private account, allowing customers to build a security data lake from integrated cloud and on-premises data sources, as well as from their private applications.

Cisco Secure Firewall, on the other hand, serves as an organization's centralized source of security information. It uses advanced threat detection to flag and act on malicious ingress, egress, and east-west traffic, while its logging capabilities store information on events, threats, and anomalies.

At re:Invent, we announced the integration of Secure Firewall with AWS Security Lake. Through this integration, organizations will be able to store firewall logs in a more structured and scalable manner. This allows customers to more easily analyze security data to get a more complete understanding of their security posture across the entire organization. They can also use their preferred analytic tools to conduct threat detection, security investigation, and response while retaining control and ownership of their security data.

AWS Verified Access with Cisco Duo

AWS Verified Access allows enterprises to enable local or remote secure access for their corporate applications without requiring a VPN. Built using AWS Zero Trust guiding principles, AWS Verified Access helps customers implement a work-from-anywhere model in a secure and scalable manner.

Cisco Duo provides multi-factor authentication, helping customers proactively reduce the risk of a data breach. With the integration of Cisco Duo and AWS Verified Access, customers can leverage this service to store and manage digital identities. This combined service allows customer employees and other users to connect with the resources they need, providing a way to manage access and add or remove privileges, all while maintaining tight security.

AWS Control Tower Account Factory Customization blueprint with Cisco Secure Firewall DC Edge Security

AWS Control Tower Account Factory Customization provides access to pre-defined customization blueprints that are built and managed by AWS partners, making it easier to create and customize new accounts that comply with a customer's security guidelines.

With the AWS Control Tower blueprint for Cisco Edge Security, customers can get an out-of-band environment with Cisco Secure Firewall that gives them the same security capabilities in the cloud environment as they would expect in their data centers. Using this solution, customers can provision customized AWS accounts in AWS Control Tower that are enabled for network security inspection use cases with Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual.

Cisco AppDynamics business transaction insights for cloud-native applications on AWS

Cisco AppDynamics Cloud provides observability tools for cloud-native applications. At re:Invent, Cisco announced business transaction insights for AppDynamics Cloud, which enables organizations to achieve observability over cloud-native applications correlated to business context across the entire hybrid-cloud environment. Business transaction insights from AppDynamics Cloud make it easy for teams to observe applications the way end users experience them, take action to remediate potential problems, and optimize performance at speed. This new capability will initially support cloud-native applications and digital services running on AWS.

Customer-first, partner-led

Cisco has been a partner-led company for decades, and we understand that as fantastic as Cisco's products and technologies are, partners have the secret sauce value-add that delivers unique solutions to meet customer use cases more precisely. With this point of view, and especially with the rise of hybrid cloud, Cisco's partnerships with AWS and mutual channel partners continue to get stronger, united as One Team and laser-focused on helping our customers exceed their outcome objectives.

Curious to learn more? Check out the Cisco and AWS partnership

to see how we can help you in your journey to hybrid cloud.

We'd love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with#CiscoPartners on social!

Cisco Partners Facebook  |  @CiscoPartners Twitter  |  Cisco Partners LinkedIn|  @CiscoPartners Twitter  |  Cisco Partners LinkedIn