Content

| 2.4 |  | Network Management Tools |
| 2.4.5 |  | Policy management tools |

The Need for Policy-Based Security
Complex security technologies are necessary to protect highly available mission critical networks from corruption and intrusion. Of particular interest in the past few years is protecting geographically dispersed enterprise networks, which use a combination of public and private WAN lines to connect remote and branch offices to major centers. Intranets, extranets, Internet connections, WANs, and LANs each have unique security requirements. Many companies wish to extend their mission-critical applications to remote offices by way of an intranet, or communicate directly with industry partners, suppliers, and key customers through extranets. These technologies enable organizations to securely conduct business in today's open environments.

Yet with all the advanced capabilities of today's applications, it is surprising to find that the task of securing the complex networks that support them is still done by hand. Administrators often use detailed command line interfaces (CLIs) to configure network devices one at a time across distributed enterprises. What's more, when policies change, implementation takes time.

Scaling Networks and Maintaining Security
In very large networks, scalability issues can make security deployment quite expensive and can lead to misconfigured systems and inconsistent policy enforcement. No centralized, coordinated mechanism exists to implement a consistent policy throughout the network, verify that it is installed and functioning properly, change it easily as required, or detect attacks, mistakes, and misuse within the network.

Cisco Policy Management Solution
Cisco believes that administrators should be able to define, deploy, and enforce a security policy without requiring network administrators to work one-by-one across dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands, of devices. The Cisco Policy Management Solution provides end to end security policy management by placing a layer of intelligence between the administrator and the network itself. This layer provides translation between the intuitive policies developed to support business processes and implementation of those policies in network devices.

The Cisco Policy Management Solution provides sophisticated tools that can analyze, interpret, configure, and monitor the state of security policy, with browser based user interfaces.

Examples of the Cisco Policy Management solution are:

Cisco VPN Solution Center Software

CiscoWorks VPN/Security Management Solution

Cisco Secure User Registration Tool