Introducing Cisco User Protection Suite

While at work, people have a simple goal. They want to easily access the resources they need to do their job. They are not always security experts, and we shouldn’t expect them to be security experts. Unfortunately, users continue to be the primary target of cyberattacks, with 74% of all breaches involving the human element. This means that we need to find better ways to protect users and safeguard organizations.

However, there are three main challenges organizations face when protecting users:

Security/Productivity Tradeoff: Traditional solutions put roadblocks in front of sensitive resources to increase protection. However, that also has the unintended consequence of adding friction for trusted users to do their jobs and creating confusion on what protocols they must follow to gain access. You need a solution that can provide a unified end user experience and respond, in real time, to changes in risk.
Evolving Threat Landscape: Bad actors are constantly finding new ways to gain unauthorized access, from phishing and social engineering to malicious website attacks and more. At the same time, organizations are enabling hybrid work across a multi-cloud, BYOD environment, and this means an expanding attack surface. Incomplete data and point-solutions limit visibility and make it difficult to determine real threats from false positives. You need a solution that protects all users, accurately identifies and prioritizes threats, and proactively prevents attacks.
Complex portfolio of point solutions: Each time a new threat vector emerges, a new solution emerges to combat that threat. That has led to a vast portfolio of solutions, with enterprises managing, on average, 76 security tools. This patchwork makes it difficult for IT and security teams to manage and can lead to undetected risks. You need a solution that is easy to buy, easy to manage, and simplifies administration to reduce risk.

This is where Cisco’s User Protection Suite comes in. The Suite brings together Duo, Secure Access, Email Threat Defense, and Secure Endpoint to protect users from the point of authentication, to accessing applications and checking email on secure devices. The solution provides end-to-end protection, so your users get the freedom they want, and you get the visibility and security you need.

Seamless, Secure Access: Cisco provides secure and seamless experience for your employees accessing applications or internet – from any device, managed or unmanaged, and from anywhere, campus, branch, home or elsewhere. We manage everything: secure connectivity to the application, authentication to it, and actionable insights into user experience around it, or in a cloud delivered easy to consume form factor.
Frustrate Attackers, Not Users: To make it frictionless, we seamlessly handle secure connectivity across different technologies, VPN, ZTNA for remote access and SSO across remote, in network and cloud apps. Furthermore, our Risk Based Authentication AI engine can recognize trusted circumstances, and significantly reduce the number of explicit authentications your workforce must endure. When explicit authentication is warranted, our Passwordless authentication can make it as easy as touching the biometric reader or a roaming authenticator such as YubiKey.
Complete Coverage: All the while we make sure to cover a wide range of use cases. Employees work from managed and unmanaged devices, contractors and partners need to access managed applications. Cisco User Protection Suite helps you verify whether devices are corporate managed, BYOD and securely registered, or third party and securely registered. We do this in a way which cryptographically ties the user to their trusted devices. This helps organizations progress on their zero-trust strategy and do so at their own pace, all while delivering a zero-friction access experience.
Minimize Attack Surface: No one knows the network, or has end-to-end visibility, like Cisco does. With over 300,000 security customers, Cisco’s Talos Intelligence sees 550 billion security events and 2.8 million malware samples per day. That telemetry is harnessed to continuously identify risk and improve your security posture. Regardless of type of user, application, or device, Cisco can integrate with your environment to reduce gaps, increase protection, and cover all the use cases, including traditional applications or unmanaged devices to minimize the attack surface.
Enhanced Visibility: Cisco provides a comprehensive suite that enables organizations to reduce silos, while improving visibility and control. This approach allows organizations to leverage a common platform that helps resolve problems end to end, limiting tool proliferation and lowering the complexity and overhead of administration. Additionally, this simplifies both the purchase and management of these tools, streamlines operations with fewer dashboards, and supports IT and security teams that are already stretched thin. Not only does the suite decrease operational costs, but it also makes your teams more efficient and strategic.

The cyber challenges facing organizations today can be overwhelming. There are too many solutions that don’t talk to each other and make it more difficult for security teams to do their jobs and employees to do theirs. Cisco is changing that dynamic. Our security solutions will help minimize the burden on humans and automate it with AI and machine learning that operates behind the scenes, simplifying security to let your organization, and its employees, get to work.

Visit Cisco’s User Protection Suite homepage to learn more.