Unfortunately, cyber criminals do not discriminate, although the larger companies offer the greatest rewards, the small business is often the easier target. So, what are the risks and are there any simple steps that businesses can take to reduce their exposure? The good news is, there are.
The step we are going to cover in this post is deploying Cisco Umbrella, a DNS level cloud-based security solution, that tackles three key issues – the protection of devices outside of the corporate firewall, the growing sophistication of attacks, and the management overhead of securing your IT environment.
The Challenge Of Protecting The Expanding Perimeter
The traditional line of defence was the firewall, protecting the perimeter of the corporate network and doing its best to block malicious attacks. However, todays end-users often operate outside of the corporate network, connecting through public internet connections, working from home or utilising direct connections from regional offices.
Cisco Umbrella operates at the Domain Name System (DNS) layer. Every time a user, regardless of whether they are on the corporate network or not, attempts to access a URL, the process of translating the URL to an IP address is done via Cisco Umbrella which determines whether the destination is safe or not. This not only protects end-users and their devices outside of your corporate network, but also blocks threats before they even reach your firewall.
Protecting Against More Sophisticated Attacks
Cyber attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often utilise many different routes into an organisation. For example, an email which is spoofed to look like a genuine email from a trusted source can easily find its way into your mailbox and entice a click on an innocuous link that opens the door to malware or ransomware.
With Cisco Umbrella every link is meticulously inspected to minimise risk. The Umbrella proxy utilises Cisco Talos web reputation as well as other 3rd party real-time feeds to determine if a URL is malicious. if there is any doubt any files attempted to be downloaded are inspected further using anti-virus and Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). Based on the outcome of this deep inspection, the connection is allowed or not.
With Cisco Umbrella you are supplementing your existing defences with intelligence from Cisco’s big data analysis of over 125 billion daily internet requests across 90 million users and enforces over 7 million malicious destinations concurrently at the DNS layer.
Reducing The Management Overhead of Security
As a cloud-based application, this is not yet another security appliance that has to be installed, configured and managed. You simply subscribe and point users to the Umbrella service, so you can be up and running in a matter of minutes.
Once operational Umbrella reduces the workload of your IT team. By acting as a highly efficient first line of defence, security teams will have far fewer malware infections, as threats will be stopped before they cause any damage.
Enterprise-Grade Security for Any Business
At amatis we see Cisco Umbrella as a way that our customers can cost-effectively deploy Enterprise-Grade Security that protects both their corporate network and their end-users regardless of their location and means of connection.
As a Cisco partner, we can provide you with the Cisco Umbrella solution as either an integral part of your connectivity services from amatis or as a stand-alone service.
If you would like to find out more and explore the options available to you, please give the amatis networks team a call on 0118 321 9944