{Editor’s Note: Josh Rennick is a Distribution Account Manager for Americas Distribution at Cisco Meraki. In this post, he discusses the impact of remote work on the network and how Meraki solutions can help protect data and devices in a remote environment.}
The pandemic environment has pushed the capabilities of corporate network infrastructure. Network scalability to support users working from home, business resiliency, and continuity planning are just a few challenges that are emerging during the pandemic environment. Almost every industry has been impacted by these challenges. With users working from home, it is extremely important to make sure that data and devices are always kept secure in the same manner as if they were working from the corporate office.
This presents many challenges for IT teams because they must re-architect their network to support remote users while keeping security top-of-mind. In addition, business resiliency is extremely important for an organization because it ensures they can quickly adapt to any disruption; such as the COVID-19 pandemic; and avoid losses in revenue while maintaining business continuity.
Best Practices to Protect Systems in Remote Environments
As the pandemic has been a catalyst for organizations to enable their users to work from home, it is critical that users follow best practices to protect their systems in today’s new environment. Creating strong passwords and implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for remote access for all remote users is the first important step. This makes it more difficult for attackers to gain access to user account and data.
The added layer of security that MFA provides ensures that only legitimate users can access their accounts; users should feel confident that their data is secure as it leaves the network. DNS security is essential for remote users because it allows them to protect their systems from being vulnerable and unintentionally connecting to servers that can be considered malicious and ultimately comprising security.
In addition, corporate and remote users should always protect their systems from threats by having their systems behind next-generation security appliances. Those appliances often can provide zero-day threat protection from malware and other security threats as well as intrusion detection and prevention.
How Cisco Meraki Solutions Help
Cisco Meraki solutions are designed with simplicity in mind to make it easier for IT teams to manage remote and corporate users as well as protect the corporate network infrastructure in terms of business resiliency and continuity.
Cisco Meraki solutions strengthen security for these systems. By leveraging the full-stack Meraki solutions, not only is the user protecting their system from the perimeter level, but also from other facets where vulnerabilities can be introduced.
Meraki provides native integration with multiple Cisco security solutions that make Meraki one of the most powerful solutions in the market today.
- Meraki offers native integrations with Cisco Duo, Talos, Umbrella, and Snort to secure not just the users and systems themselves, but also protection from unforeseen threats to the corporate data.
- Cisco Duo integration with Meraki provides MFA when IT administrators connect to the Meraki Dashboard to manage their network.
- Meraki’s integration with Cisco Talos, Cisco Umbrella, and Snort protects Meraki networks, users, and devices sitting behind it. It also ensures protection against zero-day threats, DNS-layer security, and conducts detailed protocol analysis to identify and prevent a variety of attacks, such as CGI attacks, OS fingerprinting attempts, etc.
Overall, Meraki offers complete solutions for organizations to meet the demands of the modern work environment. To learn more about how you can grow your Cisco Meraki practice, reach out to SYNNEX Comstor’s Ezequiel Rios, Product Business Manager, Cisco Meraki, at EzequielR@synnex.com.
