Chambers' keynote summarized

Chambers said companies can no longer afford to run on a loose patchwork of standalone devices; that everything must be tightly integrated.

'Whatever you do must be largely automated and self-defending,' Chambers said. 'You can't rely on human intervention. Architecture is vital... security must go across every device in the network and be part of your business process. You must be able to watch for patterns and abnormalities. You must be able to audit behavior.'

He said enterprises need networks that can easily adapt to rapidly evolving threats in the next decade. 'You have to look at the trends of the next decade and plan for it,' Chambers said. 'We all understand the trend -- security incidents are getting worse. You can't predict when and where things will happen, so you'll have to understand the how.'

Chambers predicts a rapid integration of technology in the next decade. 'Everything will be connected,' he said. 'You'll see a consolidation of data and voice companies...voice technology will be commoditized, you'll see more consolidation of telecommunication companies.' With that will come new threats, he added.

The latest phase of Cisco's Self-Defending Network initiative, Adaptive Threat Defense (ATD), was formed with those trends in mind, he said. It's designed to help enterprises minimize network risks by "dynamically addressing threats at multiple layers, enabling tighter control of network traffic, endpoints, users and applications," according to a company statement. Key components of ATD include better coordinated threat mitigation through Anti-X defenses, application security, and network control and containment.

Anti-X defenses prevent and mitigate network threats through a combination of traffic and content-oriented security services, Cisco said. Core security enforcement technologies include firewall, intrusion prevention, anomaly detection and distributed denial-of-service mitigation fused with application-inspection services like network antivirus, antispyware and URL filtering.

Application security provides advanced business-application protection using application-level access controls, application inspection, and enforcement of appropriate application-use policies, Web-application control, and transaction privacy, the company said.

Network control and containment provides the ability to layer sophisticated auditing and correlation capabilities to "control and help protect" any networked element or service such as Voice over IP (VoIP) with active management and mitigation capabilities, the company added.

A full list of Cisco's new security products is available.