Cisco IT significantly reduces attack surface with ZTA
Cisco’s Zero Trust Access (ZTA) approach ensures secure, seamless access to apps and resources with zero trust. With ZTA, Cisco IT now has flexibility, visibility, and protection for critical assets anywhere.
Cisco IT needed to reduce complexity, improve user experience, and address the limitations of traditional VPN to enable secure and low-friction access to all applications across on-premise and remote environments.
Challenge
Cisco IT needed to meet the evolving demands of distributed work and address the following issues without compromising user experience:
Fragmented access control: The team had difficulty enforcing consistent security across remote, on-campus, and branch locations.
Siloed policies: Managing separate policies for legacy VPN and modern ZTA applications created inefficiencies and security gaps.
Inconsistent experience: There was no ability to provide a seamless user experience across applications and locations.
Secure access: IT needed to ensure robust security without impacting performance.
Identity security: They had to overcome user resistance to authentication measures necessary for strong identity protection.
Solution
The team took an identity-centric approach to zero trust and integrated Cisco Secure Access with other core Cisco technologies to boost security, simplify operations, and reduce user friction.
Unified access, identity, and network enforcement enable a more secure, seamless, and scalable zero trust environment.
Minimized attack surface
99% of logins are phishing-resistant with a significantly reduced attack surface.
Seamless user experience
92% of logins are automatically suppressed, fostering employee productivity with fewer login-related distractions.
Increased efficiency
Cisco IT now manages access policies more efficiently and resolves issues faster, freeing up time to focus on strategic initiatives.
Testimonials
Security and satisfaction
"By using Duo at Cisco, we’ve achieved both strong security and a great user experience — our satisfaction scores keep rising as our security team gains confidence from our enforcement capabilities."
Sarabjeet Rana, Technical Leader, IT Security
Cisco
Operational efficiency
"Previously, securing access to internal apps required maintaining several hundred individual policy lines, each tailored to specific users, applications, or scenarios. With Secure Access, that number has dropped to just around 30 policies, easing the burden of administration, accelerating onboarding, and delivering stronger security across the organization."
Roel Bernaerts, Principal Engineer
Cisco
Transparent authentication for users
"Cisco IT’s goal has been to make the user authentication experience as transparent as possible – so easy that users are only prompted to authenticate when necessary. With the ZTA capabilities of Secure Access, protecting user-to-app connectivity – whether they’re in the office, at home, on the road, or in the air – has never been more straightforward."
Rich West, Principal Engineer
Cisco
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