At the Cisco Partner Summit in San Diego, Cisco made a major announcement to help MSPs [managed service providers] deliver security services more effectively and more profitably. They announced a significant platform advancement that adds foundational multi-customer management capabilities to Security Cloud Control, Cisco’s unified, AI-powered management platform. This innovation adds foundational multi-customer management capabilities within Security Cloud Control, Cisco’s unified, AI-powered management platform. This change aligns with Cisco’s commitment to provide a platform-based operating model that streamlines every aspect of an MSP’s security services business. The goal is to help them eliminate fragmentation, so that they can deliver faster customer outcomes and increase operating margins, while fully automating deployments to increase operating margins.
This powerful management platform leverages advanced AIOps and AgenticOps to enable organizations to centrally manage a full suite of security solutions. This includes the Hybrid Mesh Firewall with AI Defense, and Secure Access, Cisco’s advanced security service edge (SSE) offering. By unifying these capabilities within Security Cloud Control, Cisco is streamlining operations and paving the way for MSPs to overcome fragmentation, reduce operating costs, and achieve accelerated, sustainable growth.
“Earlier this year, we launched Cisco Security Cloud Control,” said Raj Chopra, SVP and Chief Product Officer of the Cisco Security Product Management organization, where he leads strategy and execution for Cisco Security and SD-WAN products. “This AI-powered platform provides a single interface for managing all security experiences. It’s been exciting to see how it’s helping our customers dramatically reduce troubleshooting and improve security outcomes – all while navigating the ever-changing security landscape.”
Chopra noted that Security Cloud Control also provides a clear pathway for customers to evolve from their existing “point” firewall to a true single Hybrid Mesh Firewall that seamlessly melds security into their network fabric.
“Now Cisco is introducing foundational, multi-customer management capabilities to Security Cloud Control designed specifically for the modern MSP,” Chopra stated. “This aligns with Cisco’s commitment to provide a platform-based operating model that streamlines every aspect of your security services business. The goal is to help you eliminate fragmentation, so you can deliver faster customer outcomes and increase operating margins while fully automating deployments to increase your operating margins.”
Chopra pointed out that these new capabilities consolidate critical functions into one intuitive, multi-customer manager view, allowing you to manage your entire customer lifecycle with unprecedented efficiency. These include Centralized Oversight and Management, where the platform strengthens your security posture and simplifies compliance by providing the high-level oversight needed to manage your business, paired with modern role-based access controls (RBAC) to ensure your teams have the precise permission required into your customer environments.
The manager view also provides simplified licensing, giving you the transparency you need to allocate, track, and audit licenses, optimizing usage and reducing friction for upsell motion. It does this by centralizing MSP-centric licensing across multiple customers, including the Managed Services Enterprise Agreement (MSEA) and pay-as-you-grow model – Managed Services License Agreement (MSLA).
Another new capability is Automation at Scale, in which the platform’s standardized API gateway automates customer onboarding, deployment, and scaling, dramatically reducing manual effort and the time needed to generate value for your customers. Using the APIs, you can also scale up customers without increasing overhead.
The final new multi-customer management capability is Centralized Product Experience. Secure Access and Secure Firewall let you monitor the deployment and health of the service and perform actions across all customers from a single, aggregated dashboard.
“MSPs are on the front lines, helping businesses navigate the complexities of modern cybersecurity, especially as AI makes threats more sophisticated,” said Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer, Cisco. “The new multi-customer management capabilities in Cisco Security Cloud Control, coupled with our Hybrid Mesh Firewall, are designed to eliminate operational friction, empower our partners to accelerate revenue growth, and ultimately deliver superior security outcomes for their customers.”
“Cisco Security Cloud Control’s unified platform means you can easily deliver end-to-end Hybrid Mesh Firewall and other network security outcomes as a service to your customers – all while reducing administrative overhead,” Chopra stated. “The platform provides you with a single place to deliver security, unlike other vendors that require you to stitch together a patchwork of products. We also offer intuitive, multi-customer manager and APIs to help you grow your customer base – and revenue— more quickly.”
When you sign a new customer, for example, your administrative team instantly creates their environment and allocates licenses. Your delivery team also leverages the platform API to integrate the new account into automated workflows, ensuring rapid and secure service activation. When a support request comes in, the right engineer is granted the correct level of access — instantly. And when engineers leave the company, their access to customer environments automatically deactivates.
The unified platform also makes it easier to attach and manage additional Cisco security services. This increases your customer lifetime value and helps solidify your role as a strategic security partner.
Cisco’s Hybrid Mesh Firewall is a distributed security solution optimized to block advanced threats, protect against vulnerabilities, including those in AI models, and enable zero-trust segmentation across data centers, clouds, and edge sites. It uses network and workload identities to create micro-perimeters, applying segmentation and AI-driven threat protection at the app edge and within workloads. This hyper-distributed security enables organizations to define policy and enforce it everywhere, across Cisco firewalls, Smart Switches, workload agents leveraging eBPF, and even third-party firewalls. Policies are managed centrally by Security Cloud Control, while telemetry integrates with Splunk.
Now with built-in support for managing multiple customers extended to Hybrid Mesh Firewall, MSPs can offer comprehensive, advanced security solutions to their clients with unprecedented efficiency and proven efficacy. These include the new Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series, which delivers advanced on-box threat inspection and integrated SD-WAN for distributed branches at up to 3x price-performance, and the Cisco Secure Firewall 6100 Series, offering extremely high-performance density for AI-ready data centers. Cisco’s latest firewall software, Secure Firewall Threat Defense 7.7, detected and stopped between 99.5% and 100% of threats in the most recent testing by NetSecOPEN, a non-profit organization that develops open, standardized testing methods for network security products.
“Testing the Cisco Secure Firewall 1200 Series, we found remarkable stability and capability for the price,” said Dustin Grimmeissen, VP, Network & Security, at West Harrison, Indiana-based AHEAD. “This performance allows us to help clients modernize and simplify their security architecture all within budget.”
Security Cloud Control for MSPs helps accelerate Hybrid Mesh Firewall adoption to deliver smarter, centrally managed protection across all environments, enabling MSPs to achieve faster time-to-market, lower operational costs, and easier upsell, with highly repeatable motions.
“The announcement on Security Cloud Control’s new capabilities for managing multiple customers is going to be key for our business,” said Justin Rice, Chief Product & Technology Officer, at Cincinnati-based CBTS. “It gives us a single pane of glass to manage multi-customer environments, which is really a game changer for MSPs.”
“We deal with 15-plus tools, platforms, and logins,” said Lucas Black, Cisco Security Services Architect at CDW Canada. “Having a single view – that single platform Cisco Security Cloud Control – will give us the ability to have all of our customers’ data in one spot, and all the products and subscriptions that they have easily available to our SOC and NOC analysts.”