Policy Assistant and Experience Insights with Cisco Secure Access

This presentation by Fay Lee and Justin Murphy, focuses on Cisco Secure Access and the integration of Generative AI (Gen AI) and ThousandEyes technology for enhancing security and user experience.

Justin Murphy introduces Cisco Secure Access, which is a cloud-provided security solution offering secure access to apps and the internet. It includes features such as proxy capabilities, data loss prevention (DLP), malware inspection, firewall, and intrusion prevention systems (IPS). He focuses on the data loss prevention aspect and the use of AI applications like ChatGPT by employees, emphasizing the need to monitor their use and prevent data leaks. Cisco has added an AI assistant to simplify policy creation, which can automate repeatable processes and reduce deployment time by about 70%. The assistant can create rules for different users and groups, and monitor and control access to AI applications, preventing the upload of sensitive data. Justin demonstrates how the AI assistant works through a live demo and a video, showing how it can block an employee named Jeff from uploading code to ChatGPT.

Fay Lee then takes over to discuss Experience Insights, a new feature in Cisco Secure Access powered by ThousandEyes technology. It aims to reduce the mean-time-to-response for user experience issues and is integrated into the Secure Access dashboard. Experience Insights allows administrators to monitor endpoint performance, network performance, and the performance of the connection from Cisco’s cloud infrastructure to the applications users are accessing. Fay provides a live demo of the Experience Insights feature, showing a map of connected users, details of their connection, and the performance of commonly used SaaS applications. She explains how administrators can drill down into specific user data to troubleshoot issues and how integration with ThousandEyes provides additional insights.

The presentation ends with a Q&A session where the audience asks about the capabilities and integration of the AI assistant and Experience Insights, the limitations of the ThousandEyes integration, and the possibility of integration with other Cisco products like Meraki.