It can give you the foresight you need to protect your organisation. It’s a security service application, delivered from the cloud as a managed service from CAE and it provides the first layer of defence against threats, wherever users go.
Top 10 benefits of Umbrella
Businesses are finding it difficult to keep a handle on the growing threat landscape. Cyber-attacks are becoming both more sophisticated, and frequent. When we consider that 71 per cent of companies targeted by ransomware attacks have been infected, it’s easy to see why IT departments are feeling the pressure. However, where malware is concerned, prevention is certainly better than cure and having the right tools in your kitbag is fundamental to business protection.
Cisco Umbrella is one of those tools. In this blog we’re covering the key benefits of Umbrella and how it can help your organisation defend against cyber threats.
1) IT’S SCALABLE TO MEET YOUR NEEDS
Umbrella is cloud-based, meaning there’s no hardware to set-up or software to maintain, and it can scale to meet your organisation’s needs. Umbrella uses DNS — a foundational component of how the internet works — as the main mechanism to get all internet requests to the cloud.
2) VISIBILITY AND PROTECTION EVERYWHERE
Cisco Umbrella protects every device on and off your network – including roaming Windows and Mac laptops, Chromebooks, iPhones, and even IOT devices. This means you can protect your workforce wherever they are online – not just when they’re in the office. Because of this Umbrella forms a key tool in CAE’s Secure Remote Worker solution.
3) EASILY INTEGRATES WITH EXISTING SYSTEMS
Umbrella was built with a bidirectional API to easily integrate with existing systems including security appliances, intelligence platforms or feeds, and custom, in-house tools. Umbrella often improves the performance of existing systems by reducing the number of incidents that they need to process. This means you can get the most from your existing tools and enrich your incident response data while enhancing protection.
4) IT’S EASY TO DEPLOY AND MANAGE
Because Umbrella is delivered from the cloud, deployment is quick and painless. All CAE needs to do is point your DNS to the Umbrella global network. You can literally start protecting users across your business in a matter of minutes.
5) IT WON’T DISRUPT YOUR PEOPLE OR AFFECT PERFORMANCE
Umbrella is always on and always protecting, without your end users needing to do anything. They won’t experience slow or broken connections, or memory impacts on their devices.
6) IT’S FAST AND RELIABLE
Umbrella is built on a global network of over 30 data centres, including 11 in Europe and the UK, co-located with the largest internet exchange points around the world. And it’s maintained 100 per cent business uptime since launching in 2006. Umbrella uses Anycast routing — every data centre announces the same IP address, so requests are transparently sent to the fastest available with automated failover.
7) PROTECTION AGAINST THREATS OVER ALL PORTS AND PROTOCOLS
By using DNS, Umbrella stops threats over all ports and protocols — not just web ports 80 and 443 like a traditional web proxy. The DNS request becomes the very first point at which Umbrella enforces security, by determining whether the domain or IP is legitimate or malicious.
8) PROXY-BASED INSPECTION OF WEB TRAFFIC AND FILES
With the Umbrella intelligent proxy, only requests to risky domains – those hosting malicious and legitimate content – are proxied for deeper inspection, removing performance impacts felt by traditional proxies. Our proxy was built using a microservices architecture that automatically scales for better performance, and we check files against AV engines and Cisco Advanced Malware Protection file reputation services.
9) DISCOVERY AND CONTROL FOR SAAS APPS
Umbrella works directly with Cisco Cloudlock to provide visibility into and to control the use of sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS apps (thus helping to stamp out shadow IT). For example, Cloudlock helps control data usage for sanctioned apps, and Umbrella can uncover unsanctioned SaaS apps being used by employees and can be used to prevent access to those apps if needed. Together, Umbrella and Cloudlock protect your users, data, and infrastructure wherever they are.
10) LIVE THREAT INTELLIGENCE
Umbrella sees the relationships between malware, URLs, domains, IPs, and networks across the internet. It analyses internet activity patterns from more than 150 billion DNS requests from 90 million users worldwide every day and automatically identifies infrastructure being staged for the next attack using a combination of statistical and machine learning models and human intelligence. Then, Umbrella proactively blocks your users from these threats before a connection is ever made or a file is ever downloaded.
