AnyConnect Makes Working From Anywhere Even More Secure

AnyConnect 4.2 adds deeper visibility and control over endpoints and network access

In our mobile, connected world more users are connecting to the corporate network with more devices from more places than ever before. In fact, analysts estimate that this year the average worker will use three personal devices for work purposes – that’s more than 15 billion mobile devices with access to enterprise networks. And the reality is that many of those devices have been compromised; 75 percent of organizations surveyed by Cisco said their mobile devices had been targeted by malware within the past 12 months.

Organizations need to provide secure access to systems and data over a mix of trusted and untrusted networks and personal and corporate-sanctioned devices. Cisco is committed to helping organizations extend security everywhere with an intelligent, seamless, and always-on connectivity experience across the proliferating scope of mobile devices.

Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client supports context-aware comprehensive security policy enforcement regardless of where the endpoint is physically located. The new Cisco AnyConnect extends security even deeper into endpoints and the network with new capabilities that provider greater visibility to protect what matters most – corporate digital assets.

Cisco AnyConnect, now version 4.2, delivers significant improvements and new features for greater endpoint visibility and control.

Increased Endpoint Visibility and Monitoring Reduces Security Risk

With the Network Visibility Module (NVM), customers can now gain a level of detail into application traffic flows previously not available from traditional network flow-based solutions, letting customers analyze for potential malware or undesirable behaviors. Available on Windows and OS X, Cisco AnyConnect NVM collects flows from endpoints (e.g., laptops) both on and off-premise along with additional context (users, applications, devices, locations/destinations). This rich context data empowers enterprise collection services with new visibility into user and endpoint behavior. This is critical in today’s enterprise IT environment as the workplace becomes borderless and application encryption makes existing enterprise tools ineffective. AnyConnect NVM exports the enriched flow information as standard flow based records allowing networking, application and security teams to address their specific challenges be it application capacity planning, troubleshooting to behavior analysis in order to detect and defend against potential advanced threats.

Reduces Attack Surface through Comprehensive Endpoint and Network Controls

Enhanced posture checks, also available for Windows and OSX, ensure endpoint compliance at point of access. Specifically, together with ISE, AnyConnect ISE Posture provides compliance validation for Disk Encryption (e.g. Bit Locker, File Vault, etc.) services to ensure that enterprise data residing on endpoints stays safe. Enterprise administrators can also add additional file check requirements to ensure specific enterprise services are maintained.

Enhanced Trusted Network Detection (TND) security is now enhanced on PC platforms to support checking to a secure web server after validation of the existing Domain or DNS rules.

Other features include:

Support for IPv6

Previously supported for Windows/iOS operating systems, additional support for IPv6 will be provided to public network environments when no IPv4 address is available.

Captive portal behavior flexibility

The captive portal detection in AnyConnect can be disabled if an organization does not need AnyConnect to provide this additional level of information to an end user.

To learn more about AnyConnect visit our page on Cisco.com or talk to your Cisco Account Manager. To learn more about how Cisco is extending Security Everywhere, watch our launch webcast.