Of the 625 sessions at the recently concluded Cisco Live gathering in Orlando, Florida, approximately 100 focused on network security. A few of these seminars were hosted by John Stuppi, a senior engineer at Cisco’s Security Research and Operations unit who discussed the company’s efforts to harden client environments and combat security threats.

Stuppi participated in several “Meet The Engineer” and “Lunchtime Table Topic” meetings with representatives from multiple client organizations, including private and public sector firms and service providers. The sessions centered on Cisco’s SIO network protection platform, common best practices, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and the NetFlow monitoring software. He found it notable that despite their different backgrounds, the customers he talked to asked similar questions: they all wanted to learn how to leverage their existing Cisco infrastructure to combat cyber threats more effectively.

A sizable portion of the 200 partners that attended Cisco Live displayed showcased security vendors. Stuppi paid special attention to DDoS protection solutions, and caught up with Arbor Networks employees to go over the newest threats in this space. He also spent some time assessing the state of Cybersecurity in the financial services sector.

Security was one of the major highlights of Cisco Live, but it was only one of several hot topics. The Catalyst 6800 switch series drew a lot of attention at the event, as did Cisco’s two new AX routers. Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman provided his take on the product announcements in an interview on NewsDesk:

“Of course networking is incorporated to be able to put that data around, and Cisco talked about the vision on how they extend things like their Catalyst line, which is the top-selling internet switch out there today,” Stu told SiliconAngle NewsDesk host Kristin Feledy. “They talked about things like SDN , talked about the future with application-aware infrastructure…Cisco does a nice job of giving this compelling future of where they’re going to bring customers.”