Cisco made its new SecureX platform globally available, unveiled a new cloud email security tool, and announced plans to rebrand its entire security portfolio under the Cisco Secure name.

And yesterday, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced in a blog post that Jeetu Patel will join Cisco as SVP and GM of its newly formed Security and Applications business group on Aug. 3.

The vendor rolled out the security blitz at this week’s Cisco Live virtual event, which was supposed to happen earlier this month. Hours before Robbins was slated to deliver his opening keynote on June 2, however, Cisco notified attendees that it postponed the event. “In light of recent events, and the turmoil happening across the United States, and some of your feedback, we feel this is the right thing to do,” Robbins said in a video message.

So, after a two-week pause, Robbins returned to the virtual stage today to kick off Cisco Live with security front and center at this year’s event.

SecureX integrates all of Cisco’s network, endpoint, cloud, and application security products, as well as threat intelligence from Cisco Talos, in a cloud-native platform. It unifies visibility and provides threat metrics across four areas, and uses a feature that Jeff Reed, SVP of product for Cisco Security Business Group, calls the “SecureX security ribbon” to essentially link all of Cisco’s security technologies so customers can access the platform across of these products.

Cisco first started talking about the new, unified security platform around RSA’s annual mega-security conference. At the time Cisco said it would make SecureX generally available in June, and then roll out updates that add other network, orchestration, and analytics products.

However, the initial SecureX launch includes more capabilities than Cisco executives originally planned. “We’ve gone really fast — particularly the automation and orchestration capabilities have come faster than we expected,” Reed said. At launch, customers can automate workflows across products from Cisco Security and third parties, and they can also automate threat hunting based on Cisco Talos threat intelligence and other intelligence sources.

Reed said it ships with about 50 connectors, some to internal Cisco products like its application performance monitoring tool AppDynamics and its ACI, which is Cisco’s SDN, as well as third-party products and vendors including Splunk, ServiceNow, Ansible, Chef, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). “These are integrations out of the box,” Reed said. SecureX also uses an open general interface to connect to additional third-party vendors and products, he added.

In future releases, Cisco plans to roll in Meraki security, SD-WAN security, and Cyber Vision IoT security as well. “Meraki is in development” now, Reed said. “SecureX is a SaaS product, and we push updates weekly.”

Cisco today also announced a new cloud-based email security service that it will make available in August. It is called Cloud Mailbox Defense for Office365 and it provides email visibility — inbound, outbound, and internal message visibility — with context to strengthen protection against phishing, ransomware, spoofing, spam, and other email threats.

“Email continues to be the No. 1 threat vector,” Reed said, noting the recent rise in COVID-19-themed email phishing attacks. “Think of this as supplemental security to your Office365 environment,” Reed said. “Instead of getting in front of the email, we get alongside and alert you if we see anything.”

Once it becomes generally available, the email security service will also connect into SecureX.

And finally, Cisco is rebranding all of its security products under the Cisco Secure name. Over the years the vendor has grown its security portfolio through acquisition — this includes its zero-trust security provider Duo Security and cloud security provider OpenDNS, which is now called Cisco Umbrella. These security products have different names that don’t necessarily tell users what they do. And historically, they lack consistency in terms of how Cisco prices and licenses these products, Reed said. “We’ve accumulated this complexity across the portfolio,” he said.

The rebranding is part of a larger effort to simplify the security portfolio, and it will include renaming the products over time. “There’s an opportunity to really help simplify and make it easier for our customers and partners to identify what this product is and what value it provides,” Reed said. “You’re gonna see this roll out over time. We’re starting with SecureX.”