In retrospect, should Cisco have acquired NetScreen?
We have no regrets. We don’t look back. We look forward. A Gartner analyst recently told us that because Cisco gear is widely used, it is becoming a target for hackers. Do you agree? I wouldn’t put is in the same category as Microsoft because everybody has a Windows desktop, while Cisco networks are under the more direct control of network managers. Part of our focus on Anti-X is finding proactive ways of dealing with the possibility of attacks. It’s all about managing risk. It can never be perfectly managed, but the concept of a “riskometer” is what’s on the mind of CIOs — they’re trying to take it from a high to a manageable moderate to low. Microsoft and Cisco this past fall announced an end-point security partnership that resulted in the sharing of technology such as application programming interfaces, but some have said it will be years before tangible results will emerge. Do you agree? I think anytime you take a very complex subject like end-point security and ask that we have i
