In collaboration with Bethany Duffrin
Saving 30 seconds doesn’t sound like quite a bit till you think about a number of 30-second financial savings per day, multiplied by weeks, months, and years. Across an enterprise, saving seconds may even quantity to lots of of hundreds of hours saved per yr. We understand it’s true as a result of we’re a type of enterprises.
More than 80,000 Cisco staff and half as many contractors authenticate for VPN entry day by day. With a mean connection time of 30 seconds, the potential time financial savings are dramatic. This interprets to shut to a half-million hours saved per yr — just by eliminating the time required to authenticate customers for digital non-public community (VPN) entry.
Our Cisco IT Customer Zero group is all the time testing and enhancing the Cisco merchandise that our staff are utilizing, to each preserve our firm protected and safe in addition to preserve a clean, seamless consumer expertise. So, once we acquired suggestions from colleagues concerning the time it takes to hook up with our VPN because of authentication verification, we knew it was time to enhance the consumer expertise.
Picture the next state of affairs (it’s possible not troublesome and all too relatable): You’re sharing your display with a buyer throughout a Webex assembly. You want to tug up a presentation saved on the community, however immediately understand you aren’t related to the VPN. You wrestle to make small speak whereas attempting to recollect the password that you just simply modified as a result of firm’s password rotation coverage. You one way or the other handle to keep in mind that you saved the lengthy string of incorrigible characters on a post-it. Now you enter it and wait to carry out multi-factor authentication.
What if, as an alternative, you have been robotically signed into VPN with out having to test a field or enter a password?
Enter passwordless VPN authentication!
Passwordless VPN authentication is certificate-based and deployed through Cisco’s Device Management suite, which is obtainable solely to Cisco staff. Once your gadget is registered and also you begin a VPN session, your certificates robotically validates your credentials (for Window and Mac customers) and authorizes your community entry with out requiring you to do something. After you’ve efficiently related, a closing multi-factor test ensures your gadget is correctly managed earlier than permitting entry to the community.
With passwordless VPN authentication, Cisco IT permits a greater consumer expertise whereas enhancing safety with phishing resistant authentication.
In August 2022, Cisco IT started introducing certificate-based authentication along with the legacy, on-premise SSO answer. Since then, roughly 53,000 distinctive customers have adopted certificate-based authentication – a quantity Cisco IT expects to rise as extra customers migrate to this cloud-based answer.
With one click on to attach, important time financial savings, and a safer expertise, passwordless VPN is a no brainer for Cisco staff.
Now, think about what you are able to do with all these additional minutes! Stay tuned for extra safety bulletins within the subsequent months.
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