Work Anywhere, Securely, with Citrix and Cisco Duo – Cisco Blogs

Working remotely has become the norm for enterprise employees. At the same time, the risk of cyberattacks is ever-present. As a result, it has become top of mind for companies to enable secure business continuity for these workers, while also delivering an optimal user experience. Simply put, businesses must protect their employees and intellectual property but not at the expense of reduced productivity and decreased employee satisfaction.

To address these challenges, Citrix and Cisco Duo have joined forces, integrating their products to enable employees to work from anywhere, seamlessly and securely.

Take the case of MarinHealth Medical Center, a midsized hospital based in Marin County, California. For this healthcare provider, it’s now standard practice for employees to remotely access both cloud-based applications such as Office 365 and internal applications such as electronic medical record (EMR) systems.

Unfortunately, today’s business landscape is permeated by malicious practices, such as credential stuffing where cybercriminals buy credentials from the dark web and attempt to use them to log into an organization’s network. A single-login security posture can’t defend against this type of vulnerability. Though a security team can certainly warn users not to share passwords across accounts, reuse passwords or click on unknown links, it has no control over actual behavior.

This is where the partnership between Citrix and Cisco Duo comes in.

The market-leading Citrix Workspace delivery platform

Founded in the late 80’s, Citrix is well known—among other things—for allowing employees to run remote applications using a local device, such as a laptop or smartphone.

Today, the Citrix Gateway product consolidates remote access infrastructure to provide a single sign-on across all applications whether they are running on premises in a data center, off premises in a cloud, or delivered by a third-party SaaS application.

In concert, Citrix Workspace provides a secure, contextual, and unified workspace—on any device. This workspace gives employees instant access to their SaaS and web apps, virtual apps, files, and desktops from an easy-to-use, all-in-one interface powered by Citrix Workspace services.

Cisco Duo adds secure authentication with advanced endpoint security

Cisco Duo increases security for employees connecting over Citrix by adding multifactor authentication (MFA) to provide a crucial second level of defense against cyberattacks such as credential stuffing.

Cisco Duo also goes a step further by checking the security posture of the devices used to access the corporate environment. If an iPad device is used, for example, Duo will verify that the operating system is on the latest patch level and that the device hasn’t been jailbroken, which can introduce additional security vulnerabilities.

Cisco Duo provides adaptive access policies as well, examining information such as the device’s physical location when issuing an MFA request to authenticate the user and device. If the device is at the employee’s home, connected on a known IP address, an administrator may select to let the employee choose a lower assurance MFA option such as one-time password. However, an access request from a different location than the employee’s home, could mean a stronger level of MFA is required such as Duo Push.

In addition, Cisco Duo makes it easier to read, filter and export analytics, enabling a security team to review why login denials have occurred. Perhaps these requests are fraudulent, or an employee must update their operating system.

Simple to use

The zero-trust Citrix and Cisco Duo security framework is also easy to use. Ease of use is particularly important because complicated logins can lead not only to disgruntled employees, but also to a host of support requests from employees simply trying to read their email remotely.

For MarinHealth, the Citrix and Cisco Duo joint solution has proven to be the right answer; it enhances logins to the hospital’s Citrix Gateway with MFA as employees and patients remotely access applications. Perhaps best of all, MarinHealth has been pleased by the small number of tickets and issues it has experienced, given the pervasiveness of use of Citrix Gateway and Cisco Duo for the hospital.

So, if your employees are working remotely, and you want to greatly reduce the risk of security breaches, learn more about how the Citrix and Cisco Duo integration might be the right answer for your organization.

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