Cisco Lands Hartman for Top Security Spot

hartman

Hartman, most recently CTO at RSA, EMC’s (NYSE: EMC) security division, is tasked with defining Cisco’s overall security technology strategy, particularly integrating security across the network infrastructure. His role at RSA and Cisco appear somewhat similar, albeit on a different platform — here’s a video of Hartman discussing his former role at RSA.

Tom Gillis, Cisco’s former top security executive, left the company a year ago and since then the spot has been filled by Young. In this video, Young touts RSA 2012 prior to his keynote speech.

Young positioned Hartman as bringing “new thinking” to Cisco to “create innovative technological solutions that will solve our customers’ biggest problems,” with “simplicity and seamlessly integrated solutions” for their network architectures. “During the past decade, Cisco’s security posture has evolved from focusing on unprotected desktops and unmanaged desktops, to proliferating device types and a future of cloud-connected ecosystems,” wrote Young in the blog post. “Bret will work with our threat and government teams to ensure that all of these are taken into consideration when defining our future technology requirements and architecture.”

Hartman’s background includes Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services security, cloud and virtualization security, policy development and management, and security modeling and analysis.

“A security visionary such as Bret Hartman will lead the way in understanding our customers’ security requirements so that we can help solve their challenges as they cope with market transitions and an evolving threat landscape,” said Young.

In mid-September, Cisco rolled out a number of new data center security solutions, including a new intrusion prevention system, a software update to its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) line, a new, virtualized ASA for multitenant environments and improvements to its AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client.