Cisco Umbrella

Enterprise network security

Security

Fast, Simple Cybersecurity for Remote Students and Work From Home Employees

By Meg Diaz

With less budget, fewer resources, and more employees working from home than ever, you may be feeling overwhelmed. You are not alone. We’ve entered uncharted waters — but that doesn’t mean you’re left without a paddle and a lifejacket. As you navigate this new world where most people in your company or students and staff in your school district are working remote from home, there’s a way that you can quickly protect their laptops and mobile devices. You can even do it right from your own kitchen (or wherever you find yourself working these days).

Why does it matter now?

Phish are biting

Unfortunately, attackers are always looking for ways to exploit vulnerable situations. This is no exception. We’ve seen some interesting trends from our global cloud infrastructure. Every day we resolve more than 200 billion DNS requests from enterprise and consumer users worldwide — across 190+ countries.

Looking at recent trends across that traffic, we’ve seen a 3.5X increase in malware, a 1.7X increase in phishing, a 2.5X increase in command and control callbacks to botnets, and a 2X increase in ransomware.

More than a case of the Mondays

Remote employees are bypassing the VPN, and the risks of compromised machines are increasing. I’ve heard from many organizations that they tend to see a spike in infected machines on their corporate network on Monday mornings. That’s when everyone connects back after using their work computer for personal use on the weekends. And Mondays are rough enough without dealing with a bunch of infected machines!

With more users working remotely, they’re likely skipping the VPN at times. Whether it’s accidental because they forgot to connect or if they must disconnect due to bandwidth restrictions or other reasons, there’s a higher chance they’ll get infected without additional protection on their laptop.

Home Wi-Fi doesn’t mean secure Wi-Fi

Your users probably have varying degrees of security on their home Wi-Fi networks. So, if they’re connecting to their home Wi-Fi and working without connecting to the VPN, they’re more vulnerable to different types of threats. (Tip: help your employees keep their home network safe with easy-to-use parental controls — check out OpenDNS for home networks)

Protecting remote workers with ease

You probably have incredibly limited time — it was true before, and it’s probably even more true right now. There are ways that you can better secure your remote workers, even in a matter of minutes. Cisco Umbrella combines multiple security functions into a single cloud-delivered service — helping you deliver the right level of security anywhere your users work.

The simplest way to get started is with DNS-layer security. DNS-layer security can be used to provide the first line of defense against threats on the internet. Any time you click a link or type a URL, the first step that happens is a DNS request to connect the IP address with the requested domain. That’s the perfect place to enforce security — if the domain or IP address is known to be malicious or associated with nefarious activity, users will be safely routed to a block page instead.

Easy to deploy in minutes

With Umbrella, there’s no hardware to deploy or software to manually update. When it comes to protecting your corporate network, simply point your external DNS requests to the IP address for our global network and all devices connecting to your network will be protected. And if your users should skip the VPN, we’ve got you covered.

If you use Cisco AnyConnect, then you can simply enable the Umbrella roaming security module — no additional agents required. It will instantly turn on and send all internet requests to Umbrella when the VPN is off, so users will be protected automatically anywhere they work. Alternatively, you can deploy the Umbrella roaming client, which will work alongside any VPN.

“It was easy. We pushed the agent out with our standard deployment tool, we configured it in the cloud, and in almost no time, Umbrella was effectively protecting users wherever they work. And, because it’s a cloud-delivered service, we don’t have to install appliances in our data center or do a lot of configuration.”

Joseph Paradi, Sr. Director – ITS Infrastructure, Avanade

Read more about Avanade’s experience here or join us for a live chat with Joseph Paradi on April 21.

Results on day 1

With Umbrella deployed, what kind of results will you see? In a customer survey, more than 50% of respondents reported seeing value in less than 1 day. Now that’s fast!

Effective, proven security

With Cisco Umbrella, we leverage intelligence from Cisco Talos, who has more than 300+ security researchers — not too shabby to have the strength of the largest commercial threat intelligence teams behind you. Umbrella leverages statistical and machine learning models to identify attacks before they launch. In recent research conducted by AV-TEST, they placed Cisco Umbrella #1 in threat prevention compared to other vendors — you can check out the full report here.

How to deploy

For more details on how to deploy Umbrella to your remote users, join our technical webinar on Thursday, March 26th or use the resources below:

Does this seem too good to be true? It’s not. We’ve built a reputation on easy deployment and powerful protection anywhere users go, on or off network. Why? So you can build your security on a solution you can trust. Take a few minutes and find out for yourself why 20,000+ customers rely on Umbrella for effective threat protection.

For more information about Cisco Umbrella, join us on Monday, March 30 for a twenty minute webinar. And finally, to help you during these times, Cisco has a free security offering. Think of it like a lifejacket to keep you safe on this journey — we’re all in this together.