Clearpath’s Blog on IT Infrastructure, Hybrid Clouds and IT Security

As more companies leverage remote work, it’s important to not to become lax about security. Instead, businesses need to find ways to maintain secure remote network access no matter where their team members are located.

More people are working from home than ever, and that’s a reality that’s unlikely to change. Even before the pandemic, your employees were likely using phones and tablets to work on the go. Unfortunately, each of those devices has unique security vulnerabilities. How does your organization’s remote device security stack up?

As much as digital advances make it easier to work from anywhere, improve efficiency and reach business goals, cybersecurity risks continue to grow and evolve alongside these advances. And while a number of technologies and strategies have emerged to help combat security risks, ranging from multi-factor authentication to VPNs to DNS-layer security, managing all of these different security solutions can be confusing.

Instead of managing security threats on a fragmented basis, using a combination of tools that each need to be managed in their own silos, companies need a more streamlined way to handle security.

Remote employee initiatives just skipped the line to be the most important item on many organizations’ IT to-do lists. In an effort to make sure you are aware of what our partners VMware, Cisco and Dell EMC are doing to help support remote employees, we put together a list of vendor initiatives as well as other important information to help you through the challenging times.

Cisco Meraki recently released a new product called the Meraki MG Cellular Gateway which Cisco SVP Todd Nightingale believes will be the fastest-launching Meraki product of all time (https://www.crn.com/cisco-takes-aim-at-cradlepoint-enters-new-market-with-meraki-cellular-gateway). We at Clearpath think that Meraki's newest product line definitely solves a problem with remote network connectivity that a lot of our clients have. With that being said I’ll now cover the following: what does it do, what is its significance, and should your organization be considering it?

There are literally thousands of enterprise security solutions on the market. Yet, 82% of enterprises want an integrated security solution and 62% are considering consolidating their security vendors (ESG Research Report). There are many benefits to this approach, but only one company is building it: Cisco. 

According to Enterprise Strategy Group, Cisco leads the pack in enterprise-class security across network, cloud, internet, email, and endpoints. But more than relying on a single anchor product surrounded by rudimentary products, Cisco is expanding and upgrading its leading products across the board and applying automation, machine learning, and threat intelligence to stop threats at the edge, protect users wherever they are, and stop threats faster.

Consider this scenario: Your network is growing. More and more people and devices are connecting to it. You’ve thrown money at optimizing and maintaining it. Security policies and sensor equipment are deployed to secure it.

Data is an asset to your business, but it’s also a threat. Your employees are demanding access to your work resources from more devices, and more outside networks than ever. This puts pressure on IT, increases your attack surface, and exposes your corporate network to threat vectors.

As part of Cisco’s commitment to securing access for the network perimeter, late last year it added Duo Security to the Cisco family. Duo is a leading provider of unified access security and multi-factor authentication delivered through the cloud.

We live in a digital age, where consumers order products, apply for business loans, and book vacations at the click of a button. But as these digital experiences have got simpler for us, for the companies behind these experiences it’s getting more complex to stay ahead of customer expectations.

The rise of connected devices, distributed architectures, and multi-clouds have increased the complexity of application environments. Companies need insight into the health of every application and every transaction in order to keep up with the pace of change. Cisco, through its acquisition of AppDynamics, may be the answer to these challenges.

What is AppDynamics?

AppDynamics is a single application and business monitoring platform that empowers the world’s largest enterprises, including Barclays Bank, United Airlines, Salesforce, AT&T, and others to build and run the applications they need to thrive.

With AppDynamics, enterprises can watch every line of code and understand its impact on user experience and application performance, while providing real-time insight into the digital business. It strips complexity and drives insights since teams have a single source of truth to focus on end-to-end performance in the context of the customer experience, instead of monitoring individual services.