UPDATED 11:45 EDT / MARCH 30 2021

SECURITY

Cisco brings passwordless authentication to its Secure Access Service Edge network security tools

Cisco Systems Inc. said today that it’s expanding its Secure Access Service Edge portfolio to help network operations and security operations teams connect users to the applications they work with in a more secure way.

The new additions to Cisco SASE come alongside a big update to Cisco’s cloud-native security platform SecureX, providing teams with additional tools to manage any emerging network threats.

Cisco said at its virtual Cisco Live event today that the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic over the last year has led to much greater urgency on the network security side. The remote-work trend has created a massively expanded attack surface, with more people working from different locations, using multiple kinds of devices, applications and more data than ever before.

“As the hub shifts from the data center to the user, a SASE architecture has emerged as a top organizational priority to provide seamless connection to applications,” Cisco said.

With that in mind, Cisco said it’s giving customers the option to purchase all of its core SASE products via a single offer, together with the flexibility to transition to a single subscription service in the future.

“Today’s announcement enables organizations to start using all of the core building blocks of a SASE architecture immediately, making it simpler than ever to continue your journey to SASE,” said Gee Rittenhouse, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group.

Today’s SASE enhancements include a new passwordless authentication service within Cisco Secure, which is the company’s portfolio of advanced threat protection services and tools. Passwordless authentication is provided by Duo Security Inc. and will enable zero trust with a frictionless login experience, the company said. It provides a way for users to log in to cloud applications via the security keys and biometrics built into modern laptops and smartphones.

Cisco believes that enterprises will embrace passwordless authentication because the limitations of passwords are well-known. Not only are they easily compromised, but they’re also difficult to manage, especially when users must remember dozens of different ones, Cisco said. It added that password requests are a big burden for information technology department support, representing the lion’s share of IT help desk tickets at many organizations and leading to lost productivity and increased support costs.

“It’s not an overstatement to say that passwordless authentication will have the most meaningful global impact on how users access data by making the easiest path the most secure,” Rittenhouse added.

Other new SASE capabilities announced today include data loss prevention tools that enable companies to discover and block any sensitive data that’s being sent to an unwanted destination and prevent data exfiltration. The new remote browser isolation capability, meanwhile, helps protect devices and networks from browser-based exploits, meaning workers will be able to safely browse the web using a company device that’s connected to the corporate network.

Cisco Umbrella Cloud, which is a cloud-delivered enterprise network security offering, is adding new malware detection tools that help to find and remove anything suspicious from a company’s cloud-based file storage applications. And the Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Onramp that’s used for deploying multicloud connected services at the edge is getting more integrations, with Google Cloud, Megaport and Amazon Web Services, Cisco said.

The SecureX platform is getting some big updates as well, which will help SecOps teams to automate many of the tasks involved with detecting and remediating threats. The updates will enable “complete protection from endpoint to the cloud,” the company said. Some of the new automated workloads include protection against the SolarWinds supply chain attack, phishing investigations and threat investigations using the latest intelligence from Cisco Talos.

The enhancements reduce time to detect threats by 95%, and time to remediate by 85%, Cisco said. It added that by building on the 27 already certified Cisco technology integrations in SecureX, ranging from email security to threat intelligence, the open platform provides easy configuration with third-party technologies such as those from Google LLC, ServiceNow Inc. and Splunk Inc.

Image: geralt/Pixabay

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU