Cisco's Security Sell

Cisco Systems is getting more serious about security and says its long-term strategy is to keep security enhancements embedded in its products.

The leading networking vendor last week added features to its Cisco 800 and SOHO 90 Series of broadband routers to provide better security for data, voice, and video communications with remote offices. Pricing begins at $349.

Many of the security enhancements result from adding in-line firewall and intrusion-detection capabilities, as well as additional support for the Session Initiation Protocol, which can help detect attack signatures. Cisco also introduced the Cisco SCA 11000 Series Secure Content Accelerator II appliance to offload Secure Sockets Layer processing from back-end Web servers. The SCA 11000 is priced at $17,995.

Says Gartner analyst John Pescatore, "Cisco is finally doing a good job selling security to their network customers."