Introduction

About Cisco Security Cloud Control

Cisco Security Cloud Control is a security platform that allows you to manage your security products and achieve security outcomes from a single integrated interface.

Integrating security products in the platform is a streamlined experience. After purchasing your subscriptions to Cisco security products, you receive a single email, with a single claim code for all the subscriptions you purchased. Entering the claim code in your new Security Cloud Control organization provisions all your products to Security Cloud Control simultaneously.

Within Security Cloud Control, user and group management occurs at the platform level. Roles are assigned to these users and groups to define their privileges for administering Security Cloud Control and the integrated products.

Navigation between products and tools is intuitive and standardized with a common platform menu and toolbar for all integrated products.

Security Cloud Control provides these additional core services to all integrated products on the platform:

  • Platform Management: Common services such as managing role-based access control, claiming subscriptions and standardized regional deployment of product instances are provided by Security Cloud Control. By centralizing these functions, Security Cloud Control ensures a consistent user experience in provisioning and managing access across all Cisco security products managed from the platform. Administrators reach these common services from the Platform Management menu in the main navigation bar of Security Cloud Control.

  • AI Assistant: The Cisco AI Assistant in Security Cloud Control is designed to streamline security operations by providing AI-driven insights, automation, and contextual guidance. It assists administrators in managing security policies, troubleshooting issues, and optimizing configurations across Cisco’s security products, including Firewall, Duo, , and Secure Access. By leveraging natural language processing and cross-platform intelligence, the assistant enhances efficiency, accelerates incident response, and simplifies security workflows.

  • Global Search: The ability to search for values across products in the platform.

  • Shared Objects: Creating and managing objects that can be shared across devices and policies.

  • Unified documentation portal: A documentation "Help" experience where all documentation is accessible in one portal.

Products You Can Integrate with Security Cloud Control

From Security Cloud Control, you can manage all of these security products:

  • AI Defense

  • Security Cloud Control Firewall Management

  • Multicloud Defense

  • Secure Access

  • Secure Workload

Products You Can Launch from Security Cloud Control

From Security Cloud Control, you can launch these security products. After launch, these products operate as standalone products and you cannot manage them through Security Cloud Control. You can only claim or deactivate the licenses of such products from Security Cloud Control.

In the Security Cloud Control toolbar, click the nine-dot menu to launch these products:

  • Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense

  • Cisco Secure Endpoint

  • Cisco Duo

  • Cisco XDR

Products Supported by Security Cloud Control

Currently, these are the products you can integrate with Security Cloud Control .

AI Defense: AI Defense addresses risks for users and providers of AI. Using network visibility and enforcement points in the Security Cloud Control, AI Defense adds detection and enforcement measures to discover sanctioned and unsanctioned AI workloads, applications, models, data, and user access across your distributed cloud environment. For organizations that develop and deliver AI-powered services, AI Defense detects vulnerabilities in your AI models before they're delivered. For your running AI applications, AI Defense guardrails intercept rapidly evolving threats, including prompt injections, denial of service, and data leakage. See AI Defense Documentation for more information.

Security Cloud Control Firewall Management: Security Cloud Control Firewall Management (formerly Cisco Defense Orchestrator) is a cloud-based security policy manager that simplifies and unifies policy across your Cisco firewalls and other devices. See Firewall in Security Cloud Control Documentation for more information.

Multicloud Defense: Multicloud Defense provides a simplified and highly automated approach to multicloud security. This solution allows organizations to manage and secure their multicloud environments using a single SaaS delivered control plane, and centralized or distributed PaaS-delivered data plane architectures. Multicloud Defense provides continuous visibility, unified protection and dynamic policy updates across all major cloud providers, thereby eliminating the need for separate point solutions for solutions for each cloud provider. See Multicloud Defense Documentation for more information.

Secure Access: Cisco Secure Access is a cloud-based platform that provides multiple levels of defense against internet-based threats. Connect securely to the internet, SaaS apps, and private digital resources from your organization's network or roaming off-network. Using policy rules, configure and enforce security controls on collections of resources, users, and devices. See Secure Access Documentation for more information. Secure Access subscriptions also include the Identity Intelligence integration via Security Cloud Control at no additional charge—this does not include access to the standalone Identity Intelligence dashboard. For more information, see Integrate Cisco Identity Intelligence with Secure Access.

Secure Workload: Cisco Secure Workload (formerly Tetration) seamlessly delivers zero-trust micro-segmentation across any workload, environment, or location from a single console. With comprehensive visibility into every workload interaction and powerful AI/ML-driven automation, Secure Workload reduces the attack surface by preventing lateral movement, identifies workload behavior anomalies, helps rapidly remediate threats, and continuously monitors policy compliance. See Secure Workload Documentation for more information.

About Security Cloud Control Firewall Management

Firewall in Security Cloud Control (formerly Cisco Defense Orchestrator) simplifies the management of security policies in distributed environments, ensuring consistent policies across all managed firewalls. The firewalls and devices are managed in Firewall, which is listed under Products in the Security Cloud Control.

It optimizes security policies by identifying inconsistencies and providing resolution tools. The platform enables object and policy sharing, as well as the creation of configuration templates, ensuring policy uniformity across devices.

Coexisting with local device managers like the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM), Security Cloud Control tracks configuration changes made by both itself and other managers, reconciling any discrepancies.

Featuring an intuitive user interface, Security Cloud Control allows management of various devices from a single platform. Advanced users can also utilize an enhanced CLI interface for more efficient management.

The platform offers a guided "Day 0" experience, facilitating the quick onboarding of threat defense devices to your on-premises or Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center. It highlights key features for potential benefits and assists in their activation and configuration.

Onboard Devices

Before you onboard a device, make sure that you have successfully completed the installation wizard and licensed the device. Then use Security Cloud Control's onboarding wizard to onboard your device. Security Cloud Control can easily manage large deployments.

See Onboard Devices and Services.


Note

Once you have onboarded devices to a Security Cloud Control tenant, you cannot migrate the devices from one Security Cloud Control tenant to another. If you want to move your devices to a new tenant, you need to re-onboard the devices to the new tenant.

For a complete list of devices that Security Cloud Control supports and manages, see Supported Devices, Software, and Hardware.

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Managing AWS with Firewall in Security Cloud Control

Using Firewall in Security Cloud Control to Manage AWS VPCs

Security Cloud Control provides a simplified management interface for your Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). You can manage your AWS VPCs and their components in the same interface you manage your other devices.

Use Security Cloud Control to perform these tasks:

These are common AWS features that Security Cloud Control expects to support in the future:

  • Showing the relationship of load balancers (elastic, network, and application load-balancers) to the security group.

  • Showing the relationship of auto-scaling groups to a security group.

You cannot manage these aspects of security groups with Security Cloud Control:

  • Creating Security Groups.

  • Linking Security Groups to instances.

  • Assigning Security Groups to load balancers.

  • VPC peering.

Onboard AWS VPCs

Start by onboarding the AWS VPC using Security Cloud Control's onboarding wizard. See Onboard an AWS VPC for more information.

Note that if an AWS VPC contains tags, these tags are imported into Security Cloud Control when you onboard the device. Security Cloud Control represents the tags as labels. Unlike security cloud objects or rules, labels are not automatically synchronized to the AWS VPC. See Labels and Filtering for more information.

Handle AWS VPC login credentials and permissions through the Security Cloud Control console. Without the correct credentials or permissions, Security Cloud Control cannot communicate with the AWS VPC. See Update AWS VPC Connection Credentials and Changing Permissions for an IAM User for more information.

View AWS VPC Details

Once the AWS VPC has been onboarded, you can view the AWS VPC's ID, region, security groups, and the rules and objects assigned to those security groups.

Work with Security Groups

Security groups are a collection of rules that govern inbound and outbound network traffic to all the AWS instances, and other entities, associated with the security group. When you onboard an AWS VPC to Security Cloud Control, the security groups are stored in Security Cloud Control as security group objects.

Using Security Cloud Control you can perform these tasks:

At this time, you cannot create new security groups in a VPC.

See these topics for more information:

Share Objects Between AWS and Other Managed Devices

Security Cloud Control supports the use of objects in rules. Objects are containers for values. For example, you could have a network object that contains the IP address of a resource and give it a meaningful name. Then you can use that object in access rules as part of the source or destination of the rule, rather than using the resource's literal IP address. You can also re-use that object in different rules. If you change the value of the object once, any rule that uses that object starts using the new value.

After onboarding an AWS VPC, Security Cloud Control translates AWS concepts into security group objects, as well as network objects, and service objects found in existing security group rules.

Network objects and service objects (sometimes referred to as port objects) can be shared between AWS VPCs and other devices you manage using Security Cloud Control. Security group objects are unique to AWS.

See Sharing Objects Between AWS and other Managed Devices for more information.

Monitoring Changes to AWS VPCs and AWS Security Groups

Change Log

The change log continuously captures configuration changes as they are made in Security Cloud Control. This single view includes changes across all supported devices and services. These are some of the features of the change log:

  • Side-by-side comparison of changes made to device configuration.

  • Plain-English labels for all change log entries.

  • Records on-boarding and removal of devices.

  • Detection of policy change conflicts occurring outside of Security Cloud Control.

  • Answers who, what, and when during an incident investigation or troubleshooting.

Change Request Management

Change request management allows you to associate a change request and its business justification, opened in a third-party ticketing system, with an event in the Change Log. Use change request management to create a change request in Security Cloud Control, identify it with a unique name, enter a description of the change, and associate the change request with change log events. You can later search the Change Log for the change request name.

Support for Common Managerial Tasks

Security Cloud Control supports these common management tasks for AWS security groups:

The Firewall Dashboard

The Firewall dashboard is your central hub for monitoring and managing tenant-level details across various categories. Upon logging in, you can access a customizable dashboard that offers critical insights and actions to optimize security and operational efficiency.

Customize Your Dashboard

Make your dashboard fit your specific needs by customizing the visible widgets.

  1. On the Home page, click Customize.

  2. Select or deselect the widgets you want to view on the dashboard.

  3. You can drag and drop the widgets to arrange them as you prefer.

The dashboard is divided into three main sections: Top Insights & Alerts, Top Actions, and Top Information. Each section provides different categories of insights to help you maintain optimal security and operational control.

Top Insights & Alerts

This section is visible only if AIOps Insights is enabled for your tenant. You can view insights related to high traffic caused by elephant flows, RA VPN forecast, access control policy anomalies, high CPU and memory usage, snort CPU and memory usage.

Top Actions

This section is visible only if AIOps Insights is enabled for your tenant. If enabled, you can view the following widgets:

  • Policy Analyzer and Optimizer: Analyzes security policies, detects anomalies, and provides optimization recommendations to improve firewall performance.

    For more information, see Policy Analyzer and Optimizer.

  • AIOps Insights: Offers detailed information on all active insights and trends, categorizing anomalies by Configuration, Health & Operations, or Traffic & Capacity.

    For more information, see AIOps Insights.

  • Feature Adoption: Provides insights into feature adoption rates to optimize usage patterns and enhance security measures.

    For more information, see Assess and Improve Feature Adoption.

Top Information

This section provides detailed insights into various tenant-level metrics. If enabled, you can view the following widgets:

  • Configuration States: Indicates the discrepancies between the configurations on your devices and those maintained by Security Cloud Control. This comparison helps identify any inconsistencies or conflicts that may exist.

    For more information, see Device Management.

  • Change Log Management: Helps you to manage the change logs for precise operational control. The widget displays Completed and Pending change logs.

    For more information, see Change Logs.

  • RA VPN Sessions: Helps you to monitor your Remote Access VPN sessions.

    For more information, see RA VPN Sessions.

  • Overall Inventory: Helps you to monitor the health and status of all devices. The widget displays the total number of devices, categorized into Issues, Pending Actions, Other, and Online.

    For more information, see All Devices.

  • Site-to-Site VPN: Helps you to manage and assess your site-to-site VPN connections. The widget displays the total number of VPN tunnels and the percentage that are Active and Idle.

    For more information, see Site-to-site VPN.

  • Accounts and Assets:

    • Helps you to track and manage your multicloud accounts and resources effectively. You can launch the Multicloud Defense Controller from here.

    • Click +Add Account to add a new account.

    For more information, see Multicloud Defense Controller.

  • Top Risky Destinations: Helps you identify and monitor the top risky destinations that are granted access. The widget lists Applications and URL Categories and allows you to filter data for the last 90, 60, or 30 days. You can filter between Allowed (default) and Blocked traffic.

  • Top Intrusion and Malware Events: Helps you to monitor and respond to top intrusion and malware events. The widget displays Intrusion Events and Malware Events and allows you to filter data for the last 90, 60, and 30 days. You can filter between Allowed (default) and Blocked events.

Figure 1. Dashboard with AIOps Insights Enabled

Announcements

Click the Announcements icon to look at the most recent Security Cloud Control features and updates. Links to related doucmentation is provided if you need more information on any of the items listed.