Белая книга для Cisco Cisco Identity Services Engine 1.0.4

 

 

© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 

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White Paper 

Cisco pxGrid: Automate Multi-Platform 
Communications through a Unified Architecture 

What You Will Learn 

IT Environments are drowning in a deluge of network and security information, adding complexity to security 

operations and deploying threat response. Traditional APIs are too limited, insecure and platform specific to 

provides a practical solution. Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid) provides a way for all of the diverse 

multivendor platforms in the environment to exchange information securely, in a tightly controlled bi-directional 

manner. This occurs automatically in real time, without relying on platform specific APIs. 

This paper discusses: 

● 

The operational challenges customers face today when dealing with multiple security systems that don’t 

communicate or interoperate 

● 

How Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid) enables immediate, automated inter-system communications 

● 

The Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid) architecture and operations 

● 

How developers can start integrating their platforms with pxGrid today to enable context exchange between 

their platforms and Cisco security products, as well as well as with other pxGrid enabled development 

partners 

A Growing Security and Operational Challenge 

To keep the IT environment secure and running smoothly, businesses already use a wide range of tools and 

platforms, often from different vendors. These can include identity and access management (IAM) platforms, policy 

platforms, security information and event management (SIEM) systems, threat defense systems, and many others. 

All of these tools are critical to protect the business and safeguard their operations. 

But they don’t talk to each 

other, creating multiple “silos” of information and a huge operational challenge. 

Swiveling from one tool to another adds a lot of complexity - and cost - to security operations effort. It also reduces 

the overall effectiveness of IT security, because it can take a long time, and a great deal of manual effort, to get the 

information needed from each of these tools to take the approp

riate security action or respond to a threat. That’s 

time that businesses can’t afford when an advanced attack is seeking to burrow deeper into the environment or 

exfiltrate sensitive data. 

The traditional answer to this problem was to use platform APIs to help platforms share information. But in modern 
IT environments, this approach doesn’t scale. APIs are historically specific, single-purpose integrations between 

one system and another. The number of platforms that need to share information today is just too large; 
businesses can’t realistically implement single-purpose APIs linking every tool to every other tool.