To build anything, you need tools. To solve problems, you need solutions. From building a security infrastructure to modernizing our networks to accelerating digital transformation – everything requires a bridge to take us from here to there. We live in a world of resources, and we take advantage of the solutions that present themselves as the best answers to our business challenges.
But is there such a thing as too many solutions? Can over-solving our challenges be creating new ones?
The answer is, of course, yes. More is not necessarily better. While the value of SaaS apps has helped boost overall employee productivity, collaboration, and communication, it has also created gaps in security, expensive redundancies and overlapping (or conflicting) capabilities, and run IT teams ragged trying to manage hundreds of apps.
The problem with too many apps
In a 2022 data roundup by Productiv, they found:
- Most teams now use an average of 40-60 SaaS apps
- 56% of enterprise apps aren’t managed, so there’s little to no oversight of details like renewal dates, licenses, app usage, security, and compliance
- 99% of IT leaders surveyed said their day-to-day operations were impacted by the pain points of managing SaaS applications, and nearly half (48%) said their team was spending too much time manually provisioning and managing apps.
Tool and data sprawl to this extent can create silos and communication breakdowns, as well as gaps in usability and security across users, devices, networks, and applications.
Cutting down on the clutter with SASE
Secure access service edge (SASE) is a security approach that helps to streamline and simplify security by combining multiple security functions into one solution, so you can extend data protection to devices, remote users, and distributed locations anywhere.
At the heart of Cisco’s SASE architecture is Cisco Umbrella. Umbrella strengthens and streamlines security posture by providing:
- One solution with secure web gateway, cloud-delivered firewall, cloud access security broker, and DNS security functionality, delivered from the cloud
- Visibility across all remote or on-site devices, ports, and cloud services
- Prevention against phishing, malware, and ransomware attacks
- Intelligence to uncover and defend against current and emerging threats
Umbrella is a modern approach to security, but it’s more than just another tool. The benefits of streamlining your security and consolidating functionality in the cloud include:
- Using existing investments: Cisco Umbrella is built on an open, integrated architecture that brings together tools of choice with built-in, pre-packaged integrations. Get native integration across all Cisco infrastructure and the entire Cisco Secure platform and tap into more than 400 third-party integrations to extend existing security infrastructure and amplify the power of existing security investments
- Closing the gaps: Achieve pervasive defense across your whole ecosystem with visibility across campus, data center, cloud, and edge so you can find problems and fix them faster.
- Achieving security resilience: Increase efficiency and empower your teams to focus on reducing the biggest risks to your business.
- Gaining actionable insight: Cisco threat intelligence is powered by Cisco Talos, the largest commercial threat intelligence network, so you can discover and stop more threats.
Better, more integrated security helps organizations better protect what powers their business. Cisco Umbrella not only delivers cloud security that lets you see and protect users on any device, anywhere, on or off the network, but it’s also a streamlined, flexible security solution that reduces sprawl, helps you make the most of your current investments, and helps you start the journey to cloud-delivered networking and security with SASE.
Ready to start on your SASE journey?
Download our ebook, How to Streamline Cloud Security and Embrace SASE, to learn more.
