Cisco customers can now access new risk-based capabilities across Cisco’s security portfolio to better protect hybrid work and multi-cloud environments. These advancements demonstrate progress towards realizing the full vision of the Cisco Security Cloud which will protect the integrity of an organization’s entire IT ecosystem.
Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco said “Security products should provide a frictionless user experience while minimizing risk for the organization.”
Patel added “At the same time, organizations need to look at their security resilience holistically. This is why Cisco is building an end-to-end portfolio of security solutions and integrating them into a single platform. We’re excited to share the latest innovations across zero trust, application security, and secure connectivity as we build towards our vision.”
The first-ever Cybersecurity Readiness Index, which concentrated on five fundamental pillars of security protection—identity, devices, network, applications, and data—was also unveiled by Cisco. Despite the widespread adoption of technology for device security, more development is still required to safeguard identities, networks, and apps.
Respondents ranked identity and device management as two of the three top cybersecurity threats. Alongside the widespread adoption of technology like multi-factor authentication (MFA), criminals are increasingly targeting solutions protecting users and devices.
Regrettably, while the protection of devices has seen impressive levels of acceptance, there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of identity verification. Companies worldwide are most prepared when it comes to securing devices, with almost half of them falling under the ‘mature’ (31%) or ‘progressive’ (13%) stages of adoption. However, significant advancements are required to tackle the challenge of identity verification, with only 20% of organizations falling into the ‘mature’ category, and over half categorized as ‘beginner’ (20%) or ‘formative’ (38%) stages.
Not only are these attacks becoming more frequent and current risk-based signals are failing, but authentication controls are also inflexible, creating too much friction. Security gets in the way, creating usability issues. Several features of Duo Risk-Based Authentication designed to reduce user friction and increase security efficacy in a hybrid work world are now available:
o Users can now authenticate less often in trusted situations without compromising privacy. Remembered Devices and patent-pending Wi-Fi Fingerprints allow users to stay logged in when using familiar applications, devices and networks – without collecting personal or private location information.
o Protect against authentication phishing attacks with the new Verified Push capability. In risky situations where Duo can recognize behaviour from known attack patterns, it requires the user to enter a code, instead of just pushing a button to confirm.
o Expanded Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities that cater to modern enterprises and improve productivity by notifying and enabling users to reset their passwords before they expire.
The Cybersecurity Readiness Index indicates that businesses must take immediate action to improve the security of their apps and associated workloads. While 65% are in the early or formative phases, only 12% are at a mature level of application-security readiness. With applications no longer being an add-on but rather the core of the experience economy, Cisco’s application strategy seeks to increase resilience against the expanding attack surface.
Cisco has recently revealed a noteworthy development in its applications strategy by introducing the industry’s first Business Risk Observability. This enhancement is part of Cisco’s Full-Stack Observability application security solution and is now accessible via Cisco Secure Application, which is integrated into Cisco AppDynamics. This latest solution provides a scoring system for business risks, which combines the Kenna Risk Meter score distribution and Business Transactions from Cisco AppDynamics, and also collaborates with Panoptica for API security and Talos for threat intelligence.
The company now faces risk, and operational costs have gone up as a result of IT complexity and the complexity of managing a widely dispersed workforce. The shift in traffic patterns caused by SaaS and hybrid work cannot be supported by the majority of corporate networks. Only 19% of businesses are classified as advanced in terms of network security, while more than 50% are classified as formative or novice.
Organizations are adopting Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architectures to ensure secure access to resources from anywhere. Cisco has announced that its industry-leading and first unified single-vendor SASE solution, Cisco+ Secure Connect, now supports Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela. This is a unique convergence of Cisco’s SD-WAN fabrics and top-notch cloud security services, which ensures secure access to resources from anywhere.
