According to WWT’s Chris Konrad, architecture helps accelerate progress toward IT environments where networking and security are truly converged.

As Cisco Systems partners and customers prepare for 2025, solutions provider powerhouse World Wide Technology expects Cisco Hypershield to be ranked as a “number one priority,” a WWT executive tells CRN.

Announced in AprilRanked #7 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500 rankings, St. Hypershield architecture helps accelerate progress toward IT environments where networking and security are truly converged, according to Chris Konrad, global vice president of cyber at St. Louis-based WWT.

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“The number of use cases that Hypershield can give us solves real customer problems that we talk about every day about these specific topics,” Konrad said. “Being able to roll out Hypershield with our customers will be a top priority for us. I think it’s one of the greatest competitive weapons Cisco has today.”

He noted that segmentation and vulnerability management are two of the biggest use cases WWT finds in customers for Hypershield.

Konrad said the use of segmentation tools in the past often resulted in customers being over- or under-segmented.

When it comes to striking the right balance of segmentation, he said Hypershield’s AI-driven capabilities “will help solve some of the challenges that organizations face.”

Meanwhile, as the threat landscape continues to intensify and the attack surface grows, “trying to keep up with the latest patches and the latest vulnerability management features is challenging,” Konrad said. “It will never just be static.”

“And so Hypershield is hugely important with its compensatory controls and what it can do (for vulnerability management),” he said.

Rick Miles, vice president of product management for cloud and network security at San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco, told CRN there’s no doubt Cisco’s approach to “building security in the network” with Hypershield is resonating with partners and customers. .

“All of this adds to everything else we do from a network security standpoint,” Miles said. “Being able to implement security in a very distributed way, but still take advantage of (for example) a zone-based firewall that you have, or a deployed edge firewall, or (Firewall Threat Defense); “They’re all part of the same ecosystem, the way we’re building this.”

Hypershield capabilities such as autonomous segmentation and distributed exploit protection can greatly reduce risk for customers in an automated manner, he said.

Ultimately, Miles says, “‘How do we solve the customer’s problem in the simplest way and in a highly distributed way?” “We are looking at the question,” he said. “Hypershield provides us with this.”