Security is a major league problem. The potential of cyberattack concerns CEOs and board members as chief security officers scratch their heads over the challenge of securing workloads scattered across diverse environments. Taking a 360 view of the problem is Cisco Systems Inc., as the networking giant pivots toward becoming a software management platform for multicloud environments.

“Security is really all about visibility; if you don’t have visibility you have nothing,” said Bret Hartman (pictured), vice president and chief technology officer, Security Business Group, at Cisco Systems Inc. “Cisco has this incredible footprint, incredible telemetry across the world … and that’s a big advantage that we have to really provide security.”

Hartman spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed current market challenges and the future of workload security. (* Disclosure below.)

Developers must incorporate security measures

While developers have not traditionally had to worry about security, the days when applications were contained on a single server have long gone. Applications are built out of multiple components that may run in the data center, on the cloud, and/or within a software as a service solution. This complicates the security equation and creates clashes between developer operations and security operations over compromising speed or security.

However, the real goal is to be faster AND more secure. This can be accomplished by bringing security into the development process from the start, according to Hartman. “Security is everybody’s responsibility,” he said. “This idea of having [security] much more embedded into the applications as opposed to purely being in the infrastructure … really represents the future.”

Merging development and security operations is the first step toward a unified front against the cybersecurity threat, but adding to the complexity is the multicloud, where businesses have to deal with security mechanisms and policies from multiple vendors.

“Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they’re all making massive investments to secure their own clouds, which is awesome, but they’re always also different,” Harman said. In a drive to solve the “mess” of securing workloads in a multicloud environment, Cisco announced that it is extending its AI-driven intent-based networking technology to automate security across a range of multicloud and edge networking environments.

“You can’t force it all to be the same, so a lot of what we’re working on are really tools to do that so you can define high-level policies of how you control that data and then map it to all those different platforms. That’s the goal; that’s how we get there and make progress,” Hartman said. “Security is a critical thing that needs to be embedded into everything that Cisco does.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE