Cisco  President and CEO John Chambers on Wednesday told attendees at the RSA Conference in San Francisco that in security, point products just won't do the job.

Security requires a system-wide approach, especially as applications and computing resources are increasingly distributed across networks, Chambers said in a keynote address that highlighted hardware and software products Cisco announced Tuesday at the show. They included five intrusion protection appliances, software for Cisco's routers and switches, a VPN concentrator and updated software for the company's PIX firewall platform. The process of identifying and blocking network attacks will work the same way across the appliances, the software and the firewall, the company said Tuesday.

Attacks are affecting networks too quickly for IT staff or strictly reactive products to respond, and the nature of the threats is changing too rapidly for defenses based just on already identified threat profiles, Chambers said.

"It's going too fast and (getting) too complex, and it's getting harder and harder to get our arms around it," he said. "You can't approach this problem with pinpoint products" that IT professionals have to integrate, Chambers said. The system has to be able to identify and adapt to new threats.

"It has to move to an adaptive threat defense, not a reactive threat defense," he said.

Cisco has long advocated an end-to-end systems approach to building networks, one that favors a giant such as Cisco that sells most elements of local and wide-area IP networks. It's more important to build a complete, manageable system than to save money on individual products, because purchase price makes up only 25% to 35% of total cost of ownership, while support represents up to 50%, Chambers said Wednesday.

The company will continue to move aggressively into security, a big concern for users that took Cisco and other vendors by surprise around 2000, Chambers said. Cisco will use a three-pronged strategy to keep on the cutting edge of the field, he said.

"The old IBM 20-years-ago philosophy -- 'I'll come in late and become number one' -- we all know, doesn't work," said Chambers, who cut his teeth in the IT industry as an IBM mainframe salesman in the late 1970s.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.