Cisco Catalyst Integrated Security—enabling the Self-defending Network

Network security has become the primary concern of most enterprise and commercial network administrators. Whereas the greatest concern in the past was “physical security,” the almost-weekly release of new Internet-based viruses, worms, and attack tools has vastly increased the risk to the very fabric of business productivity. Network security was once viewed merely as a firewall between the network and the Internet. Now, network managers are looking to integrate security end to end throughout the network, where security policies and capabilities permeate every place and device in the network. With the network becoming a critical integration point for IP-enabled applications and communications systems, such as Voice over IP, security is more important than ever. The place to start is the switching infrastructure.