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Making A Business Case for Cisco Duo – Strong Access Security that Delivers A Seamless User Experience 

Duo and guests from Forrester will review:

• Findings from Forrester’s industry research of access management
• Findings from a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study
• Potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Duo as their access management solution

Today, access to an organization’s environment is happening from anywhere by different types of users – employees, business partners and contractors – from different types of devices. The environment itself has expanded across the edge and beyond. This has led to an increased attack surface and lack of access visibility, leaving organizations vulnerable to a breach.

Based on these trends, the importance of an access management solution is widely accepted across organizations – but how do you go about picking the right one? Cisco Duo not only delivers strong security with multi-layered defenses and cutting-edge capabilities that thwart sophisticated malicious access attempts, it also provides a seamless experience for the end users, IT admin and security analyst – all at an unmatched value.

In this session, Cisco speakers will be joined by guests from Forrester, an analyst sharing findings from Forrester’s industry research of access management, and a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) consultant describing findings from a Total Economic Impact study commissioned by Cisco and conducted by Forrester Consulting to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Duo.

Presenter Info

Desdemona Bandini, Product Marketing Manager

Desdemona is an accomplished digital content marketer focused on emerging technologies with experience working with startups and enterprise B2Bs and B2Cs. She also loves a good podcast.

Merritt Maxim, VP, Research Director, Forrester

Merritt leads a team of analysts who provide research and advisory services that address the needs of security and risk professionals. His team focuses on identity and access management (IAM), endpoint security, threat intelligence, and vulnerability management strategies and technologies. Previously, Merritt was a principal analyst on the security and risk team, focusing on IAM best practices and technologies as well as physical security and internet-of-things (IoT) security. He continues to help clients address their IAM and physical security needs, map out customer requirements and strategies, and navigate the IAM technology and services landscape.

Mary Anne North, Consultant, Total Economic Impact, Forrester Consulting

Mary Anne North is a consultant with Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) consulting practice. The TEI methodology focuses on measuring and communicating the economic value of IT investments. It provides an ROI business case based on the costs, benefits, flexibility, and risk of investments.

As a TEI consultant Mary Anne leverages her operating, finance, and consulting experience working in and with companies ranging from start-ups to multi-billion dollar global enterprises. In operating roles leading marketing, product management, and customer success for technology-based companies, she collaborated on corporate strategy and new initiatives, established metrics, and evaluated information technology investments. As a banker, investment banker, and venture capitalist she assessed potential investments and their likely ROI.

Mary Anne holds a BA from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard.

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• Buyer's Guide

Forrester Total Economic Impact Of Cisco Duo Case Study

• Buyer's Guide
• By  CISCO
• February 28, 2024

Cisco Secure Access by Duo uses a multi-layered approach to secure access to applications in the cloud or on-premises with multifactor authentication, single sign-on, and device posture checks. To better understand the true cost and value of integrating Duo, Cisco commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting. The study found that a composite organization comprised of real-world Duo customers realized a net present value (NPV) of $3.23 million over three years and a return on investment (ROI) of 159%. But Duo’s benefits extend beyond financial gains. Forrester’s study concluded that implementing Duo led to time savings for end users, help desk staff, security analysts, and IT staff, while reducing the risk of credentials-related security.

For a complete look at Duo’s value to a business, get the key financial data points in The TEI of Cisco Duo study.

Read the full content

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Cisco Umbrella

Enterprise network security

Cisco Umbrella + Cisco Duo Are Better Together

Moving to the cloud and securing applications and data globally is paramount to protect your business. Bad actors are always looking for ways to exploit the reality of digital communication. Zero Trust reflects this evolving threat landscape and has become a central framework for security practitioners to plan their defenses.

In this blog, we’ll discuss Cisco’s approach to Zero Trust, with Cisco Umbrella and Cisco Duo working together to deliver a comprehensive security solution for Internet and cloud application access. We’ll also discuss a Hitachi use case and how Cisco Duo, along with Cisco’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering, protects their global environment.

Traditional security approaches assume that anything inside the corporate network can be trusted. A zero-trust model considers all resources to be external and continuously verifies trust before granting only the required access.

It’s a strategic approach to security that relies on the concept of eliminating trust from an organization’s network architecture, as trust is neither binary nor permanent and we shouldn’t assume that internal entities are trustworthy, can be managed to reduce security risk, or checking them once is enough. Zero trust prompts you to question assumptions of trust at every access attempt.

With Cisco Duo zero trust, you establish trust, enforce trust-based access, and verify trust continuously. You gain better visibility across your users, devices, networks, and applications because you are verifying their security states with every access request. You can reduce your organization’s attack surface by segmenting resources and only granting the absolute minimum access needed.

In the Cisco Security Outcomes Report, Volume 3 – one of the success factors to achieving security resilience was to maximize zero trust adoption. The study found that:

Respondents with mature zero trust implementations boosted their security resilience rating by 30% over organizations that hadn’t started that journey!

It also found that secure access service edge (SASE), which offers a strategy to converge networking and security into a cloud-delivered service, correlates with higher success rates for 8 out of the 9 desired security resilience outcomes and overall security resilience scores that were, on average, 15% higher than those that had no progress on the SASE front.

Umbrella and SASE

Cisco Umbrella is a cloud-delivered security platform that secures internet access and controls cloud app usage across networks, branch offices, and roaming users. It expands Cisco’s SASE offering, unifying security and network functionality in the cloud. Umbrella provides:

• Cloud-delivered firewall
• DNS-layer security
• Cloud access security broker (CASB)
• Secure web gateway (SWG)

This functionality is all included in a single cloud solution.

The secure web gateway (SWG) prevents access to potentially dangerous or prohibited sites anywhere users go, and is enabled per user, and for devices, per production equipment or sensor. It helps to protect against malware, ransomware, & C2 callbacks, with no added latency. It also provides visibility into internet activity across all locations and users.

Umbrella also includes threat intelligence, remote browser isolation (RBI) , data loss prevention (DLP) , and cloud malware detection, all while acting as a secure onramp to the internet to provide protection against threats for users anywhere they connect.

This is important because IoT and data utilization are at the forefront of smart factories, production equipment and sensors transmitting operating status data to other systems via the Internet. Cisco Umbrella monitors devices to see if they are transmitting data to the correct destinations and checks for unauthorized activities, minimizing the risk of information leakage.

Duo and zero trust

The first step of the zero-trust journey for many organizations is verifying users and devices through multi-factor authentication (MFA) . Among our Security Outcomes study respondents, rolling out MFA correlated with an 11% improvement in security resilience scores.

Duo is the world’s zero trust identity solution that protects access to all applications, for any user and device, from anywhere. It is cloud-based and designed to be easy to administer and deploy, while providing complete endpoint visibility and control. Duo verifies users’ identities with strong MFA, paired with deep insights into your users’ devices . Duo gives you the policies you need to limit access based on endpoint or user risk.

Duo supports leading MFA authentication protocols – including standards like FIDO2 WebAuthn – to enable methods including hardware keys and biometrics. With the support of FIDO2, Duo prevents session hijacking through phishing attacks by requiring channel binding. And it prevents man-in-the-middle attacks by requiring source binding. Duo also supports passwordless authentication , eliminating the issues with passwords altogether.

Umbrella + Duo provide better security together

Both Umbrella and Duo provide protection to secure users and their endpoints’ access to apps and data, and both have origins in zero trust. Cisco’s strategic approach to zero trust includes four groups of solutions to manage the trust lifecycle.

1. Establish trust

We start by establishing trust by verifying users and devices by increasing visibility. Systems like Cisco Secure Endpoint that manage endpoint operating systems may establish whether there are any existing threats. Duo Trusted Endpoints can communicate directly with it, and may be configured to prohibit authentication if the device status is out of compliance. Simultaneously, it can also use device enrollment as an indication of whether it is a corporate device which may be configured as a condition to allow authentication.

Regardless of whether the device is enrolled, especially for BYOD devices, Duo Device Health App can verify whether essential system components are safe to establish trust. This includes whether the OS and browser need to be patched, or whether storage encryption or the host-based firewall are disabled.

Duo Risk-Based Authentication may dynamically use device posture signals or context to determine whether stronger authenticators are required such as Verified Duo Push, biometric authenticators like Windows Hello and Apple Touch ID, or roaming security keys.

With Cisco Secure Email, endpoints will be protected from a significant threat vector. But if user’s personal email or just unguided surfing leads them to click on a phishing link, Cisco Umbrella will block the connection, log the threat, and notify the user appropriately. 

Nevertheless, if a user inadvertently navigated to a phishing site that feigns identification controls, Duo FIDO2 would block authentication and the establishment of trust from proceeding.

2. Enforce trust-based access

These solutions grant the appropriate level of access and enforce access policies based on the principle of least privilege . Here, other Cisco security components can be invoked. This includes Cisco ISE which may be used to establish north-south network segmentation. It also includes Cisco Secure Workload to establish east-west micro-segmentation for cloud services, to mitigate the risk of lateral movement in the event of an attack.

3. Continuously verify trust

Change is inevitable. So continuously verifying trust by reassessing trust level and adjusting access accordingly is critical, even after initial access has been granted. Here, Cisco Umbrella will continuously inspect and verify session payloads for any threats to endpoints, corporate systems, or data. 

4. Respond to change in trust

Cisco’s security solutions empower teams to respond to change in trust by investigating and orchestrating responses to potential incidents with increased visibility into suspicious changes in trust level.

Umbrella and Duo both can constantly feed threat data to Cisco SecureX , the company’s Extended detection and response (XDR) solution which delivers visibility into data across networks, clouds, endpoints, and applications. All of this is done while applying analytics and automation to detect, analyze, hunt for, and remediate today’s and tomorrow’s threats.

The Security Outcomes study found a whopping 45% better overall resilience score in organizations with progress toward XDR.

How Hitachi used Cisco Umbrella and Duo to deliver identity and security

“Cisco is a dependable partner who can share the same vision and help us tackle difficult challenges. We can do this together!” Hitoshi Tanaka, GM of Global Solutions 2 nd Office IT Strategy & Digital Integration Division Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi was working to restructure its security infrastructure, because users, devices, systems, and data are scattered widely inside and outside the company’s network due to diversified work styles, people working from home and across the world. Hitachi partnered with Cisco to enhance its security infrastructure to ensure strict authentication of users and devices using a zero-trust architecture. The goal was to safeguard all these different avenues of users’ data and Internet experience, so users could connect online with confidence.

The results of Hitachi implementing a zero-trust strategy and its partnership with Cisco were:

• SASE deployment that enabled Hitachi to take a huge leap forward in security restructuring
• Unauthorized data detected by authentication of users

Hitachi’s Cisco Umbrella + Duo partnership in zero trust security brought a decentralized approach to security where the policy follows the user, and verification is required for everything because anything that accesses the systems or data cannot and should not be automatically trusted. Factory sensors and production equipment are autonomously transmitting data and accessing systems and services, so safety must be verified against both the users and objects.

Hitachi implemented Cisco Umbrella for cloud security and Cisco Secure Access by Duo for ID/access management. Umbrella provides the comprehensive security suite, while Duo is the authentication solution supporting multi-factor authentication and biometrics.

Hitachi also required MFA for accessing the systems and services after starting a PC at home, inside the office, or from a remote location outside the office. Duo allows users to choose any combination of multifactor authentication, enabling Hitachi to design an authentication environment tailored to each work style and job type.

As digitization continues to advance in society, security will always be at the forefront.

Cisco and Hitachi both aim to bring societal benefits and superior IT solutions to customers, and Umbrella + Duo services have provided Hitachi the needed scalability to confidently rebuild the entire security infrastructure of the Hitachi Group. With this partnership there’s a common vision of security and agility for the global workforce, securing a staff of almost 350,000 people worldwide.

The benefits of Cisco Umbrella and Duo together

Duo and Umbrella are better together because they are complementary solutions. Umbrella will secure all the outbound traffic from the organization to determine where it is going on the internet. And Duo establishes user and device trust, which in turn adds another layer of protection for the organization’s information and data.

Hitachi has demonstrated well how to protect their global environments and mitigate the risk of cyber-attacks at scale with Cisco Umbrella and Duo working together.

Instant savings with a Secure Choice EA

Build your Duo and Umbrella solution together by buying and deploying through one easy-to-manage Cisco Secure Choice Enterprise Agreement . This single, flexible agreement lets you pay annually, as you go, over 3 or 5 years, with 0% financing. Find out how to get started with instant savings today.

Good things come in pairs

Want to learn more about how to use Cisco Umbrella and Duo together? Listen to our podcast, Cisco Duo and Umbrella are better together!

And if you’re ready to see our solutions in action on your network, be sure to sign up for Duo’s free 30-day trial .

Duo and Umbrella are better together because they are complementary solutions. Umbrella will secure all the outbound traffic...and Duo establishes user and device trust. Tweet this quote

Additional Resources

• Customer Story: Hitachi fortifies its remote workforce with zero trust
• Podcast: Cisco Umbrella and Duo are better together

Suggested Blogs

• Go Big & Go Chrome: Strengthen Cybersecurity in Education, the Enterprise & Beyond March 28, 2024 5 minute read
• Millions of Cisco Umbrella Roaming Client Users to Benefit From Upgrading to Cisco Secure Client March 19, 2024 4 minute read
• Your Free Upgrade to Cisco Secure Client Awaits February 15, 2024 2 minute read

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Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By Duo

Cisco Secure Access by Duo uses a multi-layered approach to secure access to applications in the cloud or on-premises with multifactor authentication, single sign-on, and device posture checks. To better understand the true cost and value of integrating Duo, Cisco commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting. The study found that a composite organization comprised of real-world Duo customers realized a net present value (NPV) of $3.23 million over three years and a return on investment (ROI) of 159%. But Duo’s benefits extend beyond financial gains. Forrester’s study concluded that implementing Duo led to time savings for end users, help desk staff, security analysts, and IT staff, while reducing the risk of credentials-related security. For a complete look at Duo’s value to a business, get the key financial data points in The TEI of Cisco Duo study.

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Forrester Total Economic Impact of Cisco Duo Case Study

Cisco Secure Access by Duo uses a multi-layered approach to secure access to applications in the cloud or on-premises with multifactor authentication, single sign-on, and device posture checks. To better understand the true cost and value of integrating Duo, Cisco commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study from Forrester Consulting. The study found that a composite organization comprised of real-world Duo customers realized a net present value (NPV) of $3.23 million over three years and a return on investment (ROI) of 159%. But Duo’s benefits extend beyond financial gains. Forrester’s study concluded that implementing Duo led to time savings for end users, help desk staff, security analysts, and IT staff, while reducing the risk of credentials-related security. For a complete look at Duo’s value to a business, get the key financial data points in The TEI of Cisco Duo study.

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Cisco Blogs / Data Center / Customers Praise the Surprising Longevity and Adaptability of Cisco UCS

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Customers praise the surprising longevity and adaptability of cisco ucs, tim shanahan.

When we introduced our first compute platform in 2009 with Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers , there was a fair amount of snickering from industry watchers and established server vendors. Most didn’t expect us to last in the compute market for more than a few years.

Not only are we still in the server business 15 years later, but the UCS B-Series is still a widely used, fully supported platform that continues to pay dividends for those who took the leap all those years ago.

As many will attest, this is not the norm. Whether it’s because of shorter support windows, frequent changes to chassis designs, or an inability to accommodate evolving power, cooling, and processing requirements, most server platforms need to be replaced every handful of years.

That was too disruptive and costly for Nathan Bullock, IT Operations Manager at Interstates, a construction industry leader based in Iowa. Bullock said the company was being forced into chassis replacements or major upgrades involving midplanes and backplanes just to leverage the newer blades.

Tired of the constant refresh cycle, Interstates deployed UCS X-Series , the successor to UCS B-Series that improves on the seminal platform in every way and was designed to last just as long—if not longer.

“I think Cisco UCS X-Series is the first platform that truly delivers on the promise of next-gen computing, where you can upgrade on the fly and continually tailor the environment to meet the needs of the business,” Bullock said. “And the longevity of the platform has really hit home with our finance, procurement, and executive teams.”

Designing for the future

So, how did we create a server platform that lasts well over a decade when the industry-standard is 5–10 years?

First and foremost, we leveraged our unparalleled networking expertise and applied it toward server innovation. We created a unified fabric that simplifies the connectivity between server, storage, and networking systems. More importantly, it eliminates the need for a fixed data plane inside the chassis, which represents the single most limiting factor in other server platforms.

Technologies change and evolve. The less you hardwire into the chassis, the more flexibility and longevity the chassis will provide.

Because of our groundbreaking unified fabric, UCS B-Series was able to seamlessly evolve from 10G to 40G using industry-standard connectors while other server platforms reached the power, cooling, and processing limitations of their fixed data plane. UCS X-Series provides an equally impressive upgrade path, ready to support the 10G/25G/40G/100G needs of today and 400G/800G needs of tomorrow.

“Our infrastructure is future proof,” said Rod Lucero, CTO of Xigent, an IT services leader that recently deployed the platform to support its new full-stack observability (FSO) offerings. “With UCS X-Series, we have a 100G backbone that can easily move to 400G and beyond. It gives us 14 years of runway and a ton of flexibility.”

That flexibility extends well beyond connectivity and network speed. UCS X-Series is fully modular, meaning different components—like CPUs, GPUs, and memory—can be mixed, matched, and swapped over time.

“Some of our workloads are more memory intensive than CPU intensive,” Bullock said of Interstates’ application portfolio. “With this new platform, we can tune each box for our specific needs instead of constantly overprovisioning or buying new ones.”

And they can adapt or upgrade those boxes as needed over an extended period of time.

For Xigent, the modularity of UCS X-Series has opened new service possibilities involving artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), high-performance computing (HPC), virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and GPU-enabled workloads. And the simplicity of our cutting-edge management platform, Cisco Intersight , has supercharged their internal operations.

“We can see and orchestrate all of the compute, storage, and networking systems in our data centers with Cisco Intersight, and it’s so easy to move things around,” Lucero said. “We can take excess capacity from one data center, move it to the other, and make it available to a customer within a day if they have an urgent need—all from a single console.”

As you consider your next server refresh or upgrade, be sure to look back as well as forward. There’s only one platform that will reliably serve your needs until 2040—and possibly beyond.

Read the Xigent case study

• Read the Interstates case study
• Learn more about UCS X-Series and Intersight

Vice President

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Excellent… it’s worth every minute of reading… mark me, ‘genuine words’

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