Cisco Umbrella helps Microland strengthen its security posture

Cisco security solutions have greatly strengthened Microland’s security posture, and initiatives are in place to restrict unauthorized device connecting to the company’s network

When you are the digital accelerator for many of the world’s leading enterprises, security is paramount. Microland provides enterprises the means to adopt and consume NextGen technologies in their quest for digital acceleration. Incorporated in 1989 and headquartered in Bangalore, India, Microland has more than 3,800+ professionals across its offices and delivery centers in Asia, Australia, Europe, Middle East and North America.

“At Microland, we accelerate the digital transformation of large enterprises by collaborating with similar partners who have innovative solutions. We adopt automation, predictive analytics, look into various other technological innovation, to help our customers achieve their business objectives,” says Bala Ramanan, Chief Information Security Officer, Microland.

Microland accelerates Digital Transformation journeys for global enterprises enabling them to deliver high-value business outcomes to their customers. It handles customers’ critical assets, and that is a lot of responsibility. A lot of security requirements must be taken care of and those requirements in turn have an impact on the Company’s clients’ security postures. While Microland had started putting together its security strategy for the year, it had not listed Ransomware as a top of the list threat vector. But things changed when the WannaCry attacks happened.

“We had to take swift action and work with the best solution available to ensure the security landscape was not compromised in any way ”. says Bala.

The strategy that the Company came up with was across layers: the perimeter, the network and the end-point. It decided to take it up in three phases. Perimeter as phase 1, end-point as Phase 2 and the network layer as Phase 3. With this strategy in place, Microland started to look for the right technology and solution to support it.

When threats get smarter, technology should too.

“When we looked at the solutions, the primary question was, which solution can help us enable instant protection? Takes less time to deploy, faster time to remediate and least time to respond and resolve? So that is when we looked at Cisco. The Cisco Umbrella is an amazing product along with the advanced malware protection with next-gen firewall and the email gateway,” says Bala.

Any malicious content coming into the organization only has two ways to come in. One, Web, and two, email. Microland enabled the Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) in these places. Additionally, it already had the Umbrella on the outermost layer.

“We enabled Cisco Umbrella in less than an hour. We just had to point the DNS to that side, and that was it. I should thank the Cisco team for their support and enabling us to do this in a very short span. It is a game-changer for us,” says Bala.

Soon, Microland moved on to its phase 2 and decided that it wanted to have the perimeter level security with Cisco products. The team was looking to enable operations in such a way that they could see a single dashboard. It was important for them to be able to see what’s happening at the click of a button so that they could take critical decisions quickly. Therefore, they brought in the Umbrella and the amp at the perimeter layer, and also went for the amp at the end-points. Further, Microland also implemented Cisco Any Connect Secure Mobility for VPN access to enhance security. It also adopted ISE - Cisco Identity Service Engine to prevent non-compliant devices from accessing the network.

A stronger security posture

Together, Cisco security solutions have greatly strengthened Microland’s security posture, and initiatives are in place to restrict unauthorized device connecting to the company’s network. This would also ensure without an anti-virus or an anti-malware agent, no system can connect to the Company’s network.


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