Are you thinking about the evolving threat landscape? You should be. Each day, new vulnerabilities are found and new exploits are crafted. Attackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, while industry trends such as cloud computing and mobility are rapidly expanding the attack surfaces. Your mobile device could act like a Trojan horse, passing right through your network perimeter. Or your compromised server could spread an infection to your most sensitive assets.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that focuses on how Cisco stays ahead of the latest security threats. Of course, to stay on top of something as fast changing and widespread as security threats, you need to understand them in great detail.

And that's what the Cisco 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) and Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) offer.

The ASR represents a snapshot in time, created from real-world data from an unparalleled view into the threat landscape. We've brought together the best data, using best-in-class security researchers who offer insight and analysis you can use immediately to improve your security posture.

This ASR report is built from Cisco SIO, a big data analytics capability that powers the Cisco Security portfolio. Cisco SIO collects intelligence from our global community of deployed security devices. It then builds a holistic "intelligence graph" that shows where advanced threats lurk across multiple vectors, and defends your organization with near real-time updates.

See the following Infographic for highlights from the ASR and the inner workings of SIO:

In our next posts, we'll look more closely about specific threats and what we're doing to counter them.