Cisco Doubles Down on Frictionless Security to Protect Hybrid Work and Multi-Cloud Environments

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.

“Security products should provide a frictionless user experience while minimizing risk for the organization,” said Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration at Cisco. “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.”

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Cisco also introduced initial findings from the first-ever Cybersecurity Readiness Index focused on five core pillars of security protection – identity, devices, network, applications, and data. While technology to secure devices is widely adopted, more progress is needed to protect identity, networks and applications.

Zero Trust

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 the solutions protecting users and devices.

Unfortunately, while we are seeing impressive levels of adoption when it comes to device protection, there is still much work to be done when it comes to identity. The highest level of readiness that companies have across the globe is in securing devices, with nearly half of companies placed in either the ‘mature’ (31 percent) or ‘progressive’ (13 percent) stages of adoption. On the other hand, significant progress is needed to meet the challenge of identity verification, with only 20 percent of organizations in the ‘mature’ category, and more than half falling into the ‘beginner’ (20 percent) or ‘formative’ (38 percent) 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:

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• Users can now authenticate less often in trusted situations without compromising privacy. Remembered Devices and patent-pending Wi-Fi Fingerprint allow users to stay logged in when using familiar applications, devices and networks – without collecting personal or private location information.
• Protect against authentication phishing attacks with the new Verified Push capability. In risky situations where Duo can recognize behavior from known attack patterns, it requires the user to enter a code, instead of just pushing a button to confirm.
• 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.

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