Embracing security resilience for the hybrid work era

Hybrid work is here to stay.According to our survey, only 9 percent of the global workforce plans to return to the office full time.Employees have become accustomed to working from home and on-the-go, and modern organizations will need to keep up with this shift to retain much-needed talent.

While flexibility has become king, many people may also miss in-person collaboration, and will want to meet with others in the office on an ad hoc basis. Businesses will need to be ready for this future of work, and empower their employees to easily conduct their roles from the office, home, coffee shop, or anywhere in between.

While it may sound daunting, it doesn't have to be. With the right strategies and technologies in place, hybrid work can afford an organization many opportunities. It can introduce enhanced levels of agility and resilience for better company performance. It can help businesses attract skilled professionals in a competitive market. And it can also lead to cost savings, greater operational efficiencies, and improved environmental sustainability.

Of course there will always be challenges. One such challenge is cybersecurity, and hence, security resilience. With more assets to keep track of in more places, hybrid work can lead to gaps in visibility and control, providing attackers with additional ways to get in. But while attackers work hard to get into your network, Cisco continues to innovate to keep them out, no matter where your devices or users may go.

Key security architectures for safeguarding hybrid work  

Many of the core security architectures we have been building and offering for the past several years will help to ensure a smoother transition to hybrid work, as well as greater security resilience:

• Cisco Zero Trust delivers a comprehensive solution to secure all access across your applications and infrastructure, from any user, device, and location. Having visibility and control over who and what is accessing your environment - and what they are doing once inside - is a critical component of a successful hybrid work strategy. Unlike traditional security, the protection offered by zero trust is not based solely on location. That way, you can make sure that only the right people and devices have permissions to access specific data at specified times.
• Cisco Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) leverages the cloud to enable seamless, secure access to applications from anywhere users work. By converging security and networking functionality into a single, cloud-delivered service, SASE improves operational efficiency and performance while also strengthening threat protection for the hybrid workforce.
• The Cisco SecureX platform harnesses the power of integration to automate and accelerate threat detection and response for a distributed environment. SecureX provides extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities and more. It brings together technologies from both Cisco and third parties for a unified view and defense across the network, endpoints, cloud, and applications.

Just as the workplace has evolved, so has the threat landscape. To make things even easier, we have put together the Cisco Secure Hybrid Work solution to provide exactly what you need to keep your business safe in this new work environment. All of our security technologies are backed by the superior threat intelligence of Cisco Talos, so customers can quickly adapt to detect and combat the latest risks. Talos also offers robust incident response services to help companies prepare for, respond to, and rapidly recover from attacks.

Learn how Mediapro used Cisco technologies to transition to hybrid work.

New hybrid work innovations  

We continue to innovate to make sure our customers are prepared for what's next. Most recently, we launched the Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series, which is specifically designed for hybrid work. The new firewall supports more remote workers with up to six times faster VPN performance, and also delivers a strong video conferencing experience. Cisco Secure Firewall enhances visibility and threat detection even in encrypted traffic, and helps strengthen your zero trust security posture. It also integrates with Cisco SecureX for rapid incident response.

Additionally, we recently unveiled the Cisco SecureX device insights feature. Device insights allows organizations to collect and correlate data from multiple sources to determine which devices are in an environment, where they are located, who is accessing them, their security status, and more. With so many new machines connecting to corporate infrastructure, this level of information is crucial for safeguarding the future of work.

Powering the future of work with Cisco  

In addition to security, Cisco's broad hybrid work portfolio spans collaboration, networking, and IoT. With a nearly 40-year history of providing secure connectivity around the globe, we are well-equipped to empower workers to perform their best from anywhere.

"Security has always been a high priority with our extensive and intricate network but was even more critical once the pandemic began," said Lukene Berrosteguieta, head of security operations at energy company, Repsol. "[Cisco] Business Critical Services has supported our efforts every step of the way to enhance and maintain network security across our entire infrastructure to ensure the safety of our customers and workers."

According to Dan Turner, CIO at Per Mar Security Services, "Once COVID-19 hit the United States...we leveraged our existing infrastructure to spin up virtual workspaces for all our employees within a week so that they could work from home.... Our Cisco systems and security frameworks allowed Per Mar to move quickly and safely to support our employees."

The way we work has forever changed, and will continue to evolve. We must enable our teams to be productive and competitive no matter what comes next. Learn how you can boost your organization's security resilience for the years ahead.

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