Hi there, I'm Tom Field. I'm Senior Vice President of editorial with Information Security Media Group. Topic of discussion today is Cisco Security and the platform advantage is my privilege. I'm speaking today with a meal card, Alfaro, part of marketing with Cisco.
And Milcar, thank you so much, taking time to speak with me tonight. Well, thank you, my pleasure, great to be with you. So to start out, it wasn't so long ago that we had security organizations rallying behind the theme of defense in depth and best of breed security solutions. Okay, what's that resulted in?
This is a great question. And as we all know, the security industry has been largely built on this notion that every time there's a new security problem, a new tool came out. And this has led to a massive proliferation of tools. There's statistics that indicate that an average, an organization can have as many as 75 or 76 security tools, which leads to really two fundamental problems.
First and foremost, you get all these point solutions that typically do one thing and they might do it quite well, but they don't solve entirely, necessarily entirely complete outcomes. So that's a problem because what happens is that you get some great solutions for very specific point issues, but you don't truly get the coverage and the protection you need for what is essentially a more comprehensive problem. So that's one issue. The other issue too is that this creates massive complexity.
It adds costs and creates lots of heterogeneous experiences. So on one hand, you end with a lot of point coverage that keeps blind spots, silos, desegregated data. And at the same time, the experiences both for security operation centers, IT and users are always fragmented. So in summary, what you end up with is a hodgepodge of good stuff that doesn't quite do what you need.
And that's where we are today. And there's a big push towards consolidation and getting some rationalization of these tools because it's led to more complexity sometimes without really giving the protection that people need. You're right, I hear that a lot of rationalizing the tools and consolidating the number of vendors organizations are dealing with in that environment. What would you say are the key advantages to a platform approach?
Yeah, so the platform advantage has several different areas that really drive benefits for customers. So first and foremost, we hear a lot from customers. And one of the things that they want is to do things to work better together. That's not unexpected.
They have problems that span across multiple facets of a solution, right? Some things can span from the end user all the way to the data center to the security operations center. So these tools that they're looking for need to integrate better. They need to have collection common services and they need to have the ability to truly share some of the benefit amongst them.
So that's one of the big benefits of the platform advantage. The other great benefit of the platforms is that typically you have fewer consoles, fewer interfaces, fewer places that you need to work on that are whole different. And that trajectory is something that our customers also look for consistently. The fewer, let's call it point of interaction, the more consistency that you're gonna get.
So that's another great, great improvement of the platform. Lastly, there's also incredible economic benefits, right? If you can acquire products under one single umbrella platform and you can have products that are packaged and built to be consumed in an outcome based way as opposed to all these individual products, you're gonna have a greater economies of scale. You're gonna have a fewer SLAs, better ways in which you can consume technology in a more predictable and more consistent fashion.
Yeah, I know, can I talk to CSOs about this? And sometimes they criticize the platform approach saying, well, no one can be top-notch at everything. And where can I afford to not be top-notch? How do you respond to that criticism of the platform approach?
Yeah, that's a fair question and a fair concern. And one of the great benefits of certainly the Cisco security platform, the idea for us is that we acknowledge that we work in a world that is heterogeneous. There are solutions in the market that do something very, very well and our tools are designed to be open and work reasonably well or very well in most instances with a lot of other technologies that customers might have either bought, developed or implemented over time. So wherever there is a need or simply some legacy that is doing something really, really well, the platform that we offer gives users the ability to have great interoperability, interconnectivity, consume data from all sources.
So we know that the world is always going to be largely heterogeneous and the way that the platform really addresses that is by becoming open, by becoming really accessible for developers and IT to work within the environments that already exist and ultimately giving customers the solutions that they need, giving them the flexibility and choice to select the best products for their outcomes. That's a fair point because I know Cisco's worked hard not just to put together the platform, but to create this atmosphere interoperability. Given that, what security outcomes do you find you're producing for your customers now with the platform approach? We really look at the outcomes in three other categories because the reality is that our suites offer a lot of benefits for multiple different types of use cases and multiple different types of users within an organization.
So we truly try to synthesize this in three pillars, right? So the first pillar, which is perhaps the most important of all three, is we drive towards better efficacy. And again, the most important thing about the platform and the offerings we're coming out with is to give users and customers truly the ability to drive greater efficacy and harden their security posture beyond anything else. At the end of the day, if the security that we're offering is not at the expectations of the customer, then that's a fail promise, right?
So we really, really need to think about efficacy as the number one thing. So the number one outcome is to help them harden their security posture vertically horizontally from the end user to the security operating system and across multiple infrastructures. So that is the number one and key outcome that we truly focus on. The second outcome is we want to give organizations the ability to have better experiences.
We know that one of the bigger challenges for most organizations is, again, this fragmentation, friction and experiences, people looking for work around people not adopting technology. So we want to make experiences as delightful as possible. So having a set of outcomes really focused on making the experiences friction free. Again, like I said earlier, with fewer points of interaction so that there's really more consistency in the way that the customer can work with the security technology, that ultimately is going to lead to greater adoption to better use from the customers.
And ultimately, having people really not find security as an adversary, but rather as a real asset for the organization. Clearly, a critically important aspect of our outcomes is better economics. We know, and as we started the conversation with, there are just too many tools that drive increased costs, complexity, many different integration points between them that sometimes don't work really, really the way that we would like them to. So our emphasis is to truly give customers an economic advantage in the way that we think that they can take benefits of the technology and accrue these benefits over time because part of the idea of the platform is that these benefits are also, there's a multiplier effect to them, right?
So more of these products working together give you better results. It's not a one plus one equals two, but rather a one plus one equals three. So every security problem is ultimately an economic problem, right? So the more we can help you reduce costs, increase efficiencies, drive better integrations, and ultimately simplify your complexity for management is a very critical outcome for our customers.
Well said, Emilkar, thanks so much for your time for your insight today. Appreciate it, thank you so much. Again, the topic has been Cisco Security and the platform advantage you just heard from Emilkar O'Faro, Product Marketing with Cisco for Information Security Media Group. I'm Tom Field.
Thank you so much for giving us your time and your attention today.