I need an Umbrella in this current climate…

Graham Fry, Managing Director, avsnet

Large or small, public or private – organisations of every size are caught in a monumental storm of malicious activity.

It’s a monsoon out there and a day doesn’t go by without another organisation reporting a breach, security issue or example where human error has caused financial loss or reputational damage.

This unrelenting stream of bad news is a problem within itself – if we become desensitised to breaches, they become the norm and businesses will fall into a state of carelessness because they believe it’s an inevitable part of business.

It’s not and can be halted, although I must admit that the current stats don’t exactly make for enjoyable reading….

60% of the time attackers penetrate and compromise an organisation within minutes. Detection takes days or longer.

One reason for this time lag is the fact that security systems often use static reputation sources rather than live internet requests and intelligence. IT teams can only react as quickly as the security intelligence that’s being fed into solutions. This needs to improve and thankfully is.

What’s more, the modern workplace is now highly distributed and user-defined. On average, companies use more than 475 third-party applications, a staggering number, and 82% of workers admit they do not always use a VPN while working.

Even security teams themselves suffer from similar fragmentation. In a recent Cisco survey, some organisations were using up to 50 different security vendors that were generating almost 17,000 alerts per week. Talk about challenging vendor management!

There needs to be a simpler solution – one that increases employee productivity, strengthens IT security, enables teams to react faster and is a better way to protect a business’s reputation and bottom line.

Cisco Umbrella is providing all those benefits and more. It is a powerful, flexible cloud security platform that intelligently learns about the latest threats, provides unrivalled visibility into network activity anywhere people are accessing it and blocks threats before they can have a negative impact on your organisation.

Cisco Umbrella’s success speaks for itself, from improving threat intelligence and covering off-network threats, to providing exceptional web filtering and protecting guest Wi-Fi networks from abuse.

Sadly the current climate is only going to get worse as the storm facing organisations intensifies not subsides.

Thankfully solutions such as Cisco Umbrella do exist and provide organisations a simple, effective option to fight back.

What’s more, seeing whether Cisco Umbrella helps your business doesn’t even cost a single penny to try thanks to a generous 14-day free trial that is perfect for evaluating its capabilities and how it can firm up your defences.

Contact me or one of my colleagues to get started!