Many organizations have the same challenges when it comes to security: blurring boundaries, more and more organized cybercrimes, difficulty in finding and retaining technical talent, and keeping up-to-date with the latest security threats and tools.

In my inaugural blog, I'd like to tell you about one useful offering: the Security Optimization Service (SOS) from Cisco Services. The service can help you keep current with what is happening in the industry and in your security fabric on an ongoing basis.

Your corporate security infrastructure fabric should be treated as a dynamic living and breathing ecosystem of policy, framework, hardware, software, applications, people, and processes, with errors, omissions, and commissions all inclusive.

Ongoing care, maintenance, optimization, change support, and user education is critical to get more out of your investments and future planning. This is the philosophy behind Cisco SOS.

SOS can help you nip issues in the bud. After all, prevention is better than cure.

SOS is an integrated subscription service offering that is designed to assess, support, plan, and optimize your security infrastructure on an ongoing basis. So you get access to the latest and greatest tools, knowledge, and infrastructure that Cisco has to offer.

With the help of expert planning, specialized security tools, a subscription to centralized security intelligence operations (SIO), and quarterly site visits from certified industry security experts, you can keep up-to-date with constantly emerging threats and an ever-changing security landscape. Also, continual analysis and tuning, security policy planning, and educating your employee and ecosystem partners helps you become a highly effective and trusted provider for long-term business security, risk management, and governance, as well as near-term tactical solutions to evolving security threats.

SOS helps the core business to:

• Have expert security knowledge and support.
• Follow security best practices for security devices, network, policy, and users.
• Review technology designs before implementation, and help future-proof it for cloud.
• Have access to pertinent security information 24