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Improve your Cyber Security Posture in 2022 with Cisco Umbrella

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Cyber security expertise has become a hot commodity in the past few years. The emergence of several high-profile cyberattacks and widespread vulnerabilities has been damaging to many companies globally. Coupled with the fact that cyber security talents are at an all-time low globally, making it even more so in the Philippines. This issue affects both enterprise and SMB companies alike. However, the main difference, is that SMB companies do not have the resources nor the budget of enterprises. around 60% of small and medium businesses go out of business within six months of a cyberattack.

So what can SMB companies do to prevent being part of that chilling statistic? This is where security solutions like that can improve cyber security posture like Cisco Umbrella can help. Cisco Umbrella was awarded last year as the best SME Security Solution in the SC awards and is nominated again for this year. Cisco Umbrella helps businesses block threats before they reach the network, endpoints, and end users. It does this by monitoring the DNS requests of users and checks for any known malicious websites associated with the said URL link. This allows for your team to monitor and enforce policies in a more central way. Written below are a few features in which you can improve your cyber security posture with Cisco Umbrella.

Preparing for Remote Work/Hybrid Setups

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Whether your company is returning to the office or adopting for a hybrid or remote work setup, your business should always be ready to protect your users outside the office perimeter. As the past year has shown, we can always be put into a spot where we have to work outside the office perimeter. Keeping your users secure from malware and enforcing security policies anywhere at anytime is key to protected business data.

Cisco Umbrella can help filter out the content and enforce security protocols event outside your network. This can even be set on a timely basis to ensure that users are not disrupted from personal commitments and can be location based.

Strengthening Security Infrastructure to lessen Disruptions

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There has been many instances of network disruptions, outages, and downtime during the past years. While they may not be instances of cyberattacks, they are also a cause for concern in the business perspective.

Take for example the 2021 Akamai outage, many companies were crippled during this software configuration update. However, those subscribed to CISCO Umbrella were able to leverage the unique DNS logging system included in the DNS-layer security. This kept them connected to their critical cloud tools despite the provider outages.

Security at no cost to Performance

Your security within your company should not hinder your network’s performance for end users. If users start experiencing slow downs due to your security solution, you effectively sacrificed performance for security. This in the long run can end up costing your company a significant amount of profit and might encourage users to use backdoor applications for convenience.

Cisco Umbrella works seamlessly behind the scenes to ensure that your users don’t even know it’s running in the background. In fact, Cisco Umbrella can also help your performance with some SaaS applications with its secure connection to some of the leading SaaS applications.

We will be covering this topic in-depth in a later article to further discuss the capabilities of Cisco Umbrella. If you would like to learn more now however, you may contact us at marketing@www.ctlink.com.ph so we can set a customer meeting with you at your convenience!

Managed Detection and Response: Helping to Fill in Business Security Gaps

Managed detection and response (MDR) is an outsourced service that provides organizations with threat hunting service and responds to threats once they are discovered. What sets it apart from other security services is the human element in which security providers provide access to their security resources such as their researchers and engineers who will now provide analysis to incidents while monitoring their networks.

The challenges MDR can solve

One of the more significant solutions MDR can provide to businesses is solving the lack of security skills within their organization. Unlike bigger organizations, not all businesses can afford to hire and train dedicated security personnel that can do full-time threat hunting, which then gives them access to security which normally would be out of their reach. This benefit is more apparent in medium sized organizations as they are targeted by cyberattacks while not having the proper resources or manpower to defend themselves adequately. However, it must be pointed out that even if organizations budget costs and manpower to a dedicated team, they might not be able to find the right personnel in the first place. In 2016, there were 2 million unfilled cybersecurity positions, a number that is expected to rise to 3.5 million by 2021.

*What an organization stands to gain when MDR comes into play*

Another challenge that is often overlooked by businesses is the sheer amount of alerts the security team receive on a daily basis. Not all the alerts are malicious, but they can’t be easily identified so they must be checked individually, and threats found must also be scanned for correlation to see if there is a connection to find any bigger attacks planned in the future, and all of this take time. MDR tries to address this problem by not only discovering the threats but also doing an analysis on the factors and indicators involved in an alert. Analyzing and contextualizing are the most important skills of a security professionals’ arsenal, as security technologies can block threats but knowing the reasons and the patterns of the incidents can help you block bigger threats in the future. MDR tries to solve the skill gap in cybersecurity that smaller organizations cannot usually afford due to their limited resources.

How does Trend Micro’s MDR work?

Trend Micro’s MDR provides a wide array of security services, including alert monitoring, alert prioritization, investigation, and threat hunting. It uses artificial intelligence models and applies them to endpoint, network, and server data in order to correlate and prioritize advanced threats. By investigating prioritized alerts, Trend Micro threat researchers can then work with organizations to provide a detailed remediation plan.

To learn more about Trend Micro’s MDR, you may read the original article or you can contact us at 893-9515 and we will be happy to answer your questions!