WWT Exec: Helping Customers To ‘Operationalize’ Cisco Hypershield Is A ‘Top Priority’

The architecture is helping to accelerate the move toward IT environments where networking and security are fully merged, according to WWT’s Chris Konrad.

As Cisco Systems partners and customers prepare for 2025, solution provider powerhouse World Wide Technology is expecting Cisco Hypershield to rank as a “top priority,” a WWT executive told CRN.

Unveiled in April, the Hypershield architecture is helping to accelerate the move toward IT environments where networking and security are fully merged, according to Chris Konrad, vice president of global cyber at St. Louis-based WWT, No. 7 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2024.

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“The number of use cases that Hypershield can provide for us is solving real customer challenges that, every single day, we’re in conversations about those particular topics,” Konrad said. “For us to be able to operationalize Hypershield with our customers will be a top priority for us. I think it’s one of the biggest competitive weapons that Cisco has today.”

Segmentation and vulnerability management are two of the biggest use cases that WWT is finding with customers for Hypershield, he noted.

In the past, the deployment of segmentation tools frequently ended up in customers becoming over-segmented or under-segmented, Konrad said.

When it comes to getting the balance right around segmentation, the AI-driven capabilities of Hypershield are “going to help solve some of those challenges that organizations are having,” he said.

Meanwhile, as the threat landscape continues to intensify and the attack surface continues to grow, “trying to keep up with the latest patches, the latest vulnerability management capabilities—it's hard,” Konrad said. “It’s never going to just be static.”

“And so Hypershield—with its compensating controls and what it can do [for vulnerability management]—is a big deal,” he said.

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

“All of this is additive to everything else we’re doing from a network security perspective,” Miles said. “Being able to enforce security in a very distributed manner, but still benefiting from [for example] a zone-based firewall that you have, or an edge firewall that’s deployed, or [Firewall Threat Defense]—it's all part of that same ecosystem in the way that we’re building this out.”

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

Ultimately, “we're looking at, ‘How do we solve the customer’s problem in the simplest way and in a highly distributed way?’” Miles said. “Hypershield gives us that.”