In collaboration with Bethany Duffrin

Saving 30 seconds doesn’t sound like lots till you think about a number of 30-second financial savings per day, multiplied by weeks, months, and years. Throughout an enterprise, saving seconds may even quantity to a whole bunch of hundreds of hours saved per yr. We all know it’s true as a result of we’re a kind of enterprises.

Greater 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 personal community (VPN) entry.

Our Cisco IT Buyer Zero staff is at all times testing and enhancing the Cisco merchandise that our staff are utilizing, to each hold our firm secure and safe in addition to preserve a clean, seamless consumer expertise. So, once we acquired suggestions from colleagues in regards to the time it takes to hook up with our VPN because of authentication verification, we knew it was time to enhance the consumer expertise.

Image the next situation (it’s probably not tough and all too relatable): You’re sharing your display screen with a buyer throughout a Webex assembly. You have to pull up a presentation saved on the community, however out of the blue understand you aren’t linked to the VPN. You battle to make small speak whereas making an attempt to recollect the password that you simply simply modified as a result of firm’s password rotation coverage. You in some way handle to do not forget 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 routinely signed into VPN with out having to verify a field or enter a password?

Enter passwordless VPN authentication!

Passwordless VPN authentication is certificate-based and deployed through Cisco’s Machine Administration suite, which is obtainable solely to Cisco staff. As soon as your system is registered and also you begin a VPN session, your certificates routinely validates your credentials (for Window and Mac customers) and authorizes your community entry with out requiring you to do something. After you’ve efficiently linked, a ultimate multi-factor verify ensures your system is correctly managed earlier than permitting entry to the community.

With passwordless VPN authentication, Cisco IT allows 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, vital 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 further minutes! Keep tuned for extra safety bulletins within the subsequent months.

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