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ndly means that may permit its 130,000 customers to securely work anyplace, from any gadget, with out friction. By leveraging its personal Duo Passwordless, the crew was capable of eradicate phishable multi-factor authentication elements, enhance usability and productiveness, scale back authentication actions by 93%, and safe its workforce from anyplace. 

At Cisco, securing our office for the longer term means constantly adapting to technological developments and staying forward of the menace panorama. Leveraging our personal suite of safety merchandise, together with Duo, has been key in serving to us do this.  

When most of our workforce labored remotely in the course of the pandemic, we applied Duo Past and moved from a standard network-based perimeter and VPN mannequin to a zero-trust framework in order that customers may securely work anyplace, from any gadget, with out friction. 

At this time, our zero-trust journey continues as we try to fulfill the safety wants of as we speak whereas adapting for what’s subsequent with Duo Passwordless. Id is now the perimeter— the primary line of protection in opposition to cyber threats. With most knowledge breaches coming from weak or stolen credentials, it’s clear that the longer term requires passwordless authentication. 

The issue with passwords

To place it merely, passwords are a straightforward goal for hackers. As soon as the gold commonplace for safeguarding delicate data, passwords at the moment are outdated and weak within the ever-evolving menace panorama. They’re extremely inclined to phishing assaults, may be simply forgotten, and infrequently result in person frustration that brings an inflow of password-related assist desk tickets to IT groups.  

When affected by password fatigue, customers are inclined to make use of weak, reused, or solely barely modified passwords throughout completely different accounts. Good password administration is tough and troublesome to implement, and previous to utilizing Duo Passwordless, Cisco IT struggled to handle these challenges throughout an enormous workforce spanning greater than 130,000 customers.  

As a big firm and a pacesetter in know-how, a compromise in our safety can have a significant affect on our enterprise and our innovation. If attackers acquire delicate data resembling supply code, inside system particulars, buyer knowledge, or mental property, it not solely places our enterprise and staff in danger, however the prospects who depend on our know-how. We wanted to adapt our strategy to authentication to mitigate the password associated safety dangers to our enterprise and challenges confronted by our staff and assist groups.

Conventional multi-factor authentication (MFA) is now not adequate

Authentication has advanced as cybercrime has develop into an increasing number of subtle. We began with “one thing ,” or a username and password. We added MFA, which mixes “one thing ” with “one thing you’ve” or “are” like a tool or fingerprint. Whereas stronger than a username and password alone, the “one thing ” issue of a password remained inclined to vulnerabilities.  

The transfer to passwordless: specializing in safety and person expertise

We started working carefully with the Duo product crew to take a user-friendly, zero belief strategy that not solely enhanced safety but in addition improved the person expertise. To do that, we applied Duo Passwordless. It wasn’t nearly enhancing safety, however on the identical time cultivating a seamless expertise that may higher serve our prospects and staff each now and into the longer term.

While Duo Passwordless remains to be MFA, it takes it a step additional and combines the expertise into one step, making for a smoother person expertise. It depends on cryptographic public-private key pairs, using biometrics (resembling fingerprint or facial recognition) or safety keys like YubiKeys to authenticate customers with out the necessity for passwords.

Enhancing Duo as buyer zero

As “buyer zero” for Duo Passwordless, we had the flexibility to check and enhance the know-how by way of early pilot packages earlier than launch. Utilizing a multi-phased strategy, we began with a small group of IT and safety workers, enhancing efficiency and performance by way of suggestions earlier than progressively increasing to the complete workforce over 10 months. The data gained from preliminary pilot teams and insights into how completely different customers could be impacted helped form our strategy to speaking the adjustments with our workforce. 

By means of cautious collaboration between groups throughout our group, Cisco IT Safety and the Safety and Belief Group (S&TO) started driving the path of our passwordless future. My crew inside IT Safety served as the principle drivers behind this effort, with S&TO offering change administration assist, and IT UX, IT Comms, and IT Analysis & Analytics supporting as wanted. Assist@Cisco additionally performed a task as soon as we shifted to necessary passwordless just for key apps, managing the assist course of for our inside customers so service groups may give attention to the operation and enchancment of the product.  

Challenges and classes discovered

Whereas the complete rollout has seen excessive ranges of natural workforce enrollment with restricted promotion, there have been some challenges with adoption. Many customers reported preliminary considerations with using biometrics. For instance, Home windows Good day customers who didn’t log in with biometrics by default, merely didn’t know to set it up. Except particularly instructed, customers on this state of affairs didn’t notice biometrics have been an possibility for them.  

To treatment, we targeted on worker schooling round how biometrics are used, the place they’re saved, in addition to the worth of shifting to passwordless authentication. As well as, we offered options to biometrics. For instance, on Home windows, customers can use a PIN. In the event that they don’t like platform-based authenticators, they will use a YubiKey with a PIN or setup a passkey on a cellular gadget. 

Additionally essential to notice, we didn’t initially mandate the transfer to passwordless. Our strategy to encouraging worker adoption and alter was formed by our dedication to delivering one of the best person expertise. We wished to ship providers and know-how that acted as a magnet for adoption fairly than a mandate.  

Now that we’re additional into our journey, now we have began Passwordless Solely enforcement on sure apps. The slower, however at-will transition allowed natural adoption and helped get individuals comfy with the brand new know-how prior to creating the follow necessary. 

 The affect: A safer and productive workforce

Because the passwordless answer was made obtainable to the whole workforce, we’ve seen substantial advantages together with:  

• Zero password-related safety incidents 
• A frictionless expertise for over 130,000 staff with zero belief safe entry 
• Improved usability and productiveness, decreasing authentication actions by 93% 
• Enhanced safety by eliminating phishable MFA elements 
• Substantial discount in IT time and prices resulting from fewer password-related points

The long run: Continued innovation and growth

Whereas there’s a lengthy highway forward of a full trade shift away from passwords completely, this has primarily been about altering the expertise for our workforce as we speak and mitigating potential future threats for our enterprise. Getting ready for a totally passwordless future is a journey that we proceed to construct and enhance on, together with: 

•  Enhancing safety and usefulness for our workforce: Our journey started with our implementation of Duo Past and continues with Duo Passwordless, underpinning our present transition to Cisco Safe Entry inside Cisco IT (extra to return!). Id safety is a basis for zero belief entry, and Duo is far more than simply MFA.  
• Strengthening and evolving our zero-trust structure: The profitable rollouts of our Duo options mixed with the newest rollout of Cisco Safe Entry unlocks even stronger zero belief outcomes with an identify-first SSE.  

Study extra about Duo Passwordless Authentication, our journey, and the highly effective mixture of Cisco Safe Entry and Duo. For Cisco staff, learn to arrange passwordless in your Cisco gadget right here.

Extra Assets:

PS:  Attending Cisco Stay in San Diego this June? 

You’ll have a particular alternative to speak reside with Cisco IT consultants to dive into these success tales and different deployments! Look for Cisco on Cisco in every of the showcases and you should definitely search Cisco on Cisco within the session catalog to add our classes to your schedule!

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Cisco wanted to scale its digital help engineer that assists its technical help groups all over the world. By leveraging its personal Splunk expertise, Cisco was in a position to scale the AI assistant to help greater than 1M circumstances and liberate engineers to focus on extra advanced circumstances, making a 93+% buyer satisfaction ranking, and guaranteeing the crucial help continues working within the face of any disruption. 

In case you’ve ever opened a help case with Cisco, it’s doubtless that the Technical Help Middle (TAC) got here to your rescue. This around-the-clock, award-winning technical help staff providers on-line and over-the-phone help to all of Cisco’s prospects, companions, and distributors. The truth is, it handles 1.5 million circumstances all over the world yearly.

Fast, correct, and constant help is crucial to guaranteeing the client satisfaction that helps us preserve our excessive requirements and develop our enterprise. Nonetheless, major occasions like crucial vulnerabilities or outages can trigger spikes within the quantity of circumstances that slow response occasions and rapidly swamp our TAC groups, influenceing buyer satisfaction consequently.  we’ll dive into the AI-powered help assistant that assists to ease this challenge, in addition to how we used our personal Splunk expertise to scale its caseload and enhance our digital resilience. 

Constructing an AI Assistant for Assist

staff of elite TAC engineers with a ardour for innovation set out to construct an answer that might speed up challenge decision occasions by increaseing an engineers’ capability to detect and remedy buyer issues. the was created — it’s greater than an AI bot and fewer than a human, designed to work alongside the human engineer. 

Fig. 1: All circumstances are analyzed and directed to the AI Assistant for Assist or the human engineer based mostly on which is most acceptable for decision.

By instantly plugging into the case routing system to investigate each case that is available in, the AI Assistant for Assist evaluates which of them it may simply assist remedy, together with license transactions and procedural issues, and responds on to prospects of their most popular language. 

With such nice success, we set our eyes on much more help for our engineers and prospects. Whereas the AI Assistant for Assist was initially conceived to assist with the high-volume occasions that create a major inflow of circumstances, it rapidly expanded to incorporate extra day-to-day buyer points, serving to to cut back response occasions and imply time to decision whereas constantly sustaining a 93+% buyer satisfaction rating. 

Nonetheless, as using the AI Assistant grew, so did the complexity and quantity of circumstances it dealt with. An answer that when dealt with 10-12 circumstances a day rapidly ballooned into lots of, outgrowing the methodology initially in place for monitoring workflows and sifting by log knowledge.  

Initially, we created a technique referred to as “breadcrumbs” that we tracked by a WebEx area. These “breadcrumbs,” or actions taken by the AI Assistant for Assist throughout a case from finish to finish, had been dropped into the area so we may manually return by the workflows to troubleshoot. When our assistant was solely taking a small quantity circumstances a day, this was all we wanted.  

The issue was it couldn’t scale. Because the assistant started taking over lots of of circumstances a day, we outgrew the size at which our “breadcrumbs” technique was efficient, and it was not possible for us to handle as people.  

Figuring out the place, when, and why one thing went mistaken had grow to be a time-consuming problem for the groups working the assistant. We rapidly realized we wanted to: 

• Implement a brand new methodology that might scale with our operations 
• Discover a answer that would offer traceability and guarantee compliance

Scaling the AI Assistant for Assist with Splunk 

We determined to construct out a logging methodology utilizing Splunk, the place we may drop log messages into the platform and construct a dashboard with case quantity as an index. As an alternative of manually sifting by our “breadcrumbs,” we may instantaneously find the circumstances and workflows we wanted to hint the actions taken by the assistant. The troubleshooting that may have taken us hours with our authentic methodology could possibly be completed in seconds with Splunk.  

The Splunk platform affords a sturdy and scalable answer for monitoring and logging that allows the capabilities required for extra environment friendly knowledge administration and troubleshooting. Its capability to ingest giant volumes of knowledge at excessive charges was essential for our operations. As an trade chief in case search indexing and knowledge ingestion, Splunk may simply handle the elevated knowledge circulate and operational calls for that our earlier methodology couldn’t.   

Tangible advantages of Splunk

Splunk unlocked a degree of resiliency for our AI Assistant for Assist that positively impacted our engineers, prospects, and enterprise.

Fig. 2: The Splunk dashboard affords clear visibility into features to make sure optimized efficiency and stability. 

With Splunk, we now have: 

• Scalability and effectivity: Splunk displays the assistant’s actions to make sure it’s working accurately and supplies the power for TAC engineers to observe and troubleshoot workflows, permitting the assistant to effectively scale. The AI Assistant for Assist has efficiently labored on over a million circumstances so far. 
• Enhanced visibility: With dashboards that permit for fast entry to case histories and workflow logs of our assistant, the TAC engineers overseeing the processes save time on case opinions to ship quicker than ever buyer help. 
• Optimized processes with real-time metrics: The visibility into useful resource allocation permits us to optimize our enterprise processes and workflows, in addition to display the worth of our answer with real-time metrics. 
• Proactive monitoring: Splunk ensures all APIs are totally functioning and displays logs to alert us of potential points that might influence our AI Assistant’s capability to function, permitting for fast remediation earlier than buyer expertise is impacted. 
• Larger worker and buyer satisfaction: Engineers are geared up to deal with greater caseloads and effectively reprioritize efforts, lowering burnout whereas optimizing buyer expertise. 
• Lowered complexity: The dashboards have a easy interface, making it a lot simpler to coach and onboard new staff. The convenience of use additionally serves to enhance the capabilities of the people working our AI Assistant by enhancing their accuracy and effectivity. 

By offering a scalable and traceable answer that helps us keep compliant, Splunk has enabled us to keep up our dedication to distinctive customer support by our AI Assistant for Assist.

Extra Assets:

PS:  Attending Cisco Dwell in San Diego this June? 

You’ll have a particular alternative to speak dwell with Cisco IT consultants to dive into these success tales and different deployments! Look for Cisco on Cisco in every of the showcases and you should definitely search Cisco on Cisco within the session catalog to add our periods to your schedule!

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