Is remote working putting your business at risk?
Friday 12th March 2021
From overnight necessity to the new normal, remote working is now part of everyday life. Over the past year, employees haven’t just grown used to it, a significant number now value it as a way to achieve a better work/life balance. In fact, 61% of workers would now prefer to work from home more often, driving a far-reaching shift to hybrid working. Equally, many businesses have come through the global shakeup of working practices with a new perspective. They see that work can be reimagined to become a more satisfying and productive experience for employees.
But to achieve any of this, you need a network that’s more than equal to the task, and this starts with security.
A foundation for a hybrid future
As soon as lockdown rules mandated a rapid pivot to working from home, we’ve been working with our customers to ensure business continuity. Central to this effort was a transformed approach to security, suitable for a dispersed workforce and the host of new threats that came with it – and for that, the solution of choice for many was Cisco Remote Secure Worker.
The power of a comprehensive solution
Two things quickly became clear as remote working became a reality. Firstly, IT and security teams faced a deluge of devices connecting to the network. Secondly, dealing with a multi-vendor approach to securing remote work incurred extra time, effort and cost, putting an additional burden on teams who were already feeling the strain.
Cisco Secure Remote Worker is a comprehensive solution that protects users working from anywhere, at any time, on any device. Unlike a multi-vendor approach, Cisco makes it simple, quick and effective to scale security controls for the remote work environment – ideal for lean IT set-ups. And better still, security teams get increased visibility and control, with all information coming from a single source.
One solution to rule them all
Cisco Secure Remote Worker really does let businesses move to a single vendor with complete confidence as so much is packed into one solution. It gives security teams a positive answer to key security questions, essential to protecting users, devices and the information that flows between them.
Ask yourself these questions. Can you check that the user trying to connect to the network is definitely who they say they are? Can you be sure their device doesn’t have malware on it? Can you protect users when they aren’t on the network?
With Cisco, the answer is yes. So, let’s take a look at the clever suite of security tools that give you protection and the power to take action.
Cisco Duo Security
With a dispersed workforce, businesses need a zero-trust approach to security. Cisco Duo ensures only the right people access the network by using multi-factor authentication to verify their identity. It also enables IT teams to inspect the devices that are requesting access to check their trustworthiness. This can spot devices that are using stolen credentials and prevent a breach.
Umbrella
With Cisco Secure Remote Worker, employees can use a VPN to connect securely to a corporate network. But what happens when users aren’t on the VPN? That’s where Cisco Umbrella comes into its own. It provides off-network endpoint security and defends against threats on the internet, wherever employees go. Cisco Umbrella logs or blocks all internet activity destined for malicious infrastructures – a step up from antivirus, sandboxes, or other agents that only do half the job. This makes Cisco Umbrella one of the easiest, fastest ways to protect roaming workers 100% of the time, without compromising on performance.
Cloud Mailbox Defense for O365
Email is still one of the popular targets with cybercriminals. Without adequate protection, email is an easy channel for malware infection and account takeovers. Cisco Mailbox Defense brings enhanced security and superior threat intelligence to email, blocking malware, spam and phishing emails. It’s simple to deploy and is fully integrated into Office 365. This gives visibility into inbound, outbound and internal messages and reassurance that company emails are not a soft target.
Cisco Secure Endpoints (AMP) and SecureX
Endpoints are second only to email when it comes to cyber attacks, with cyber criminals realising that endpoint security was difficult to manage during the rapid shift to remote working. Cisco Secure Endpoint (formerly AMP) enables IT security teams to protect, detect and respond to advanced threats by uniting user and endpoint security. But you can’t talk about Cisco Secure Endpoints without talking about Secure X, which is a cloud-native platform that comes with all Cisco Security products. With these two technologies working together, it delivers integrated XDR capabilities across your whole environment. By bringing everything into a single pane of glass, SecureX significantly streamlines the security workload. It cuts down detection from days to hours, with security teams able to reduce incident response times by up to 85%.
It’s all part of how Cisco delivers comprehensive and coordinated protection, ensuring Cisco SecureX dovetails with all the Secure Remote Worker technologies.
Smarter together – safer together
At Bytes, we’ve seen SME, corporate and public sector customers strengthen their security with Cisco Remote Worker, enabling them to embrace remote working with confidence. You always have flexibility in how you work with us. We can help you with the deployment of Cisco Secure Remote Worker and hand over to your in-house team to run it. Alternatively, we can set up and manage everything for you, so your IT team is free to focus on strategic projects and added-value activities. It’s entirely up to you. If you’d like to know more, get in touch.
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