The Coronavirus pandemic has forced many businesses to enable remote working at short notice. Large increases in the number of workers requiring secure access to on-premise resources from home mean that it is more important than ever to carry out a health check on your Cisco remote access solution. Cybercrime has reportedly increased since the Coronavirus pandemic began because the criminals know that many businesses do not have adequate security protocols in place.

Here are some steps you can take to ensure your organisation is secure:

Cisco Firepower Threat Defence and ASA appliances have a platform limit for concurrent connected users, which scales with platform size. You should review the published datasheets for your perimeter appliances to be sure that they can accommodate the number of remote access users you require. You can contact us if you are unsure of how to do this.

Once you are satisfied that your perimeter platforms can handle the number of remote access users you will require, check the current state of your AnyConnect licensing. As of the release of AnyConnect version 4.x, licensing for AnyConnect has migrated to Cisco’s new Smart Licensing platform. Further information on the new AnyConnect licensing model can be found here.

With many workers outside of the office, internal software deployment solutions may not be able to push out AnyConnect packages to users. However, users can run through the package installation procedure themselves by browsing to the VPN gateway FQDN or outside IP address. This allows self-service onboarding to speed up extending your remote access deployment.

Whilst an increase in remote access workers typically requires an increase in the access to resources provided, it is more important than ever to expose the minimum required internal resources to allow your employees to work. Review your device configurations and ensure you have access control restrictions via an Access Control Policy (for FTD) or a VPN filter/DAP (for ASA).

Increasing the number of remote users widens the risk of illegitimate access being gained to internal resources through compromised user credentials. If you do not have an MFA solution currently in place, consider an evaluation of Cisco Duo which can provide additional authentication via mobile device, biometrics or security key.

With the business world rapidly transitioning to remote work, ensuring that employees can work from home securely and efficiently is vital.

We’ve put together a short Secure Remote Working Checklist with some important things to consider when checking if your business is ready. Please click below and we will email the checklist to you.