The explosive growth of video, mobility, Internet-of-Things, and cloud services has brought about enormous business opportunities. Service Providers are adopting open and programmable network architectures that increase business agility and lower costs. However, adversaries are increasingly exploiting the growing attack surface presented by these new services and expanded network connections.

British Telecom, the largest service provider in the UK, has recently announced a partnership with Cisco to deliver threat-centric security solutions based on our joint expertise and leadership. By partnering with Cisco, BT will strengthen network and advanced threat protection capabilities and automate its threat intelligence to detect, analyze and remediate attacks, while providing the same security capabilities in offerings to their customers, with BT Assure Cyber, BT's Managed Security Portfolio.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down withLes Anderson, VP of BT Cyber, and ask him how BT manages security to protect their networks and their customers and to get his take on our new partnership.

Sam Rastogi -Cisco Security:What changes in the threat landscape are you observing?
Les Anderson:Over the last 13 months, BT has experienced a 1,000% increase in threats. We've seen our networks targeted in ways that we haven't seen before. There is unprecedented speed in the innovation, resiliency and evasiveness of cyber attacks.

CS:How do you counter these threats?
LA:Partnership with Cisco for threat-centric security and consolidating where it makes sense for our business and our customers.

CS:What security technologies are top of mind for you?
LA:We need threat-centric technologies that are able to stop threats. We look to solutions, such as ASA with FirePOWER Services, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), and Next-Generation IPS (NGIPS) -all, working together. They amount to a differentiated capability in the market -to see and stop more threats for us and our customers.

CS:How do you view security as a growth engine for organizations?
LA:BT doesn't compromise when it comes to prioritizing our own cybersecurity; security can be a growth engine for business like BT to take full advantage of today's opportunities to be more productive, make organizations more efficient and customers happier by keeping systems - both ours and our customers - secure.  By relying on threat-centric security, we're thus able to focus on our core business goals, making security a differentiator. Investing in security in turn inspires further trust in doing business with us and with our customers.

CS:Why did you choose to partner with Cisco? And why now?
LA:Cisco has made smart security acquisitions and technology innovations that provide a significant differentiation in the market. I'm seeing that Cisco has the ability to deploy security products into SDN and virtualized environments to unlock additional value that is critical to security. Lastly our joint portfolio has allowed us to sell the largest cyber strategic security capability globally to a nation state. This is all possible with the strong partnership we have in place together.

Watch this video to learn how BT is taking advantage of security solutions from Cisco to protect its own environment and its customers:

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