Managed Services
Security Service Edge

Networking is full of acronyms, and SSE is one of the newer ones to add to the list.

There's a few key problems that SSE is designed to solve. Most people now work on laptops making them highly mobile - and while they might spend a portion of their time in the office, they definitely spend as much out of the office - home, coffee shops, airports and so on.

How can you ensure that these laptops and other devices are secure wherever they are and that the same policy is applied to them if they're in the office - or on the road? SSE if the solution to security and centrally controlling the security to these devices.

In this blog we'll explore this, alongside our Managed Services for SSE.

SSE Managed Service

Our Managed Service for SSE is all about helping you deploy the tools to secure your remote workforce.

It’s pretty confusing when you first look at that graphic above as to how you would deploy these systems.

Our SSE Managed Service focuses on the making your life easy: we’ll help deploy and manage the four key tools that make up the core of the SSE offering

You’ll need the relevant licencing for the tools detailed below, but in essence our managed service will:

• Ensure you have the right licencing to deploy SSE
• Work with you to undertake the deployment:
  • Cisco Secure Connect, or Cisco Secure Access
• Set up our management systems to monitor the SSE tools

Work with you to provide the level of visibility and alerting that is right for your business.

In the rest of this blog, we'll have a run through the high level tools that make up the Cisco Security Service Edge.

Secure Web Gateway (SWG)

Cisco Secure Web Gateway provides for the termination and proxying of web traffic.

This allows your web access to run in an isolated environment - whatever nasties you might encounter on a website are not running on your machine, but an isolated environment, preventing your machine being infected.

The termination of a user's encrypted traffic allows that internal traffic to be inspected, and any security issues to be identified and eliminated.

The SWG application interlinks with others too. So Firewall-as-a-Service, Cloud Access Security Broker, DNS Layer Security, and others are part of the overall Cisco Secure Access / Secure Connect suite.

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA)

Zero Trust, as a concept, revolves around granting the minimal level of access to a user or device when it connects to your network.

Typically, this approach starts with no access and then you grant the access that the specific client requires.

The first phase in deploying Zero Trust is to establish user trust and ensuring the end device is indeed who they claim to be. For this we often use MFA, which you are likely already familiar with.

Following this, the process continues with verifying that trust, enabling access to applications, and continuously verifying that access.

Cisco Duo provides an end client capable of delivering that initial stage of trust, along with several other aspects of the comprehensive Zero Trust network access framework.

Zero Trust is about applying central policy, so a user can connect via whatever means and get a consistent experience - this typically allows them access to certain resources. The MFA requirement is to ensure the user really is who they say they are before you apply that policy.