Cisco’s security software releases its latest update

Cisco announced the release of the latest version of their Secure Network Analytics (SNA) software.

To track more data flows and respond to security alerts more quickly, Cisco released an updated version of its Secure Network Analytics (SNA) software. SNA release 7.4.2 includes improvements such as the capacity to gather, process, and store data more effectively, as well as the ability to run on Cisco's high-performance UCS M6 hardware.

As stated in a blog post by Jay Bethea, product marketing manager with Cisco's secure email group, the network analytics software from Cisco is made to assist organizations in detecting and responding to security threats by utilizing telemetry data from various sources and improving learning into network behavior to proactively identify risks.

According to Crystal Storar, director of product management at Cisco Security, SNA release 7.4.2 has exceptional scale and effectiveness, easily processing 3 million flows per second and enhancing reporting and query performance by 94%.

The new package adds to the centralized data storage features that were initially introduced in SNA release 7.3. Instead of having telemetry data stored on separate, distributed Flow Collectors (the monitoring system that collects network data traffic packets); a centralized database processes the flows coming from those devices with a centralized storage system. Cisco claims that by centralizing the data store, the system is able to process massive amounts of data very quickly, allowing Cisco Analytics queries to be answered more quickly than they would if the data were kept on separate Flow Collectors.