Cisco reports that mobile data traffic grew 17 times in the five years between 2012 and 2017, and is projected to rise another seven times between 2017 and 2022. This great influx of mobile devices in the workplace can be a liability and a burden to IT managers everywhere.
Specifically, this growth increases the difficulty of securing and authenticating ever-present mobile devices on the network in a reliable and workflow-friendly manner.
That’s changing. Cisco Meraki’s new Trusted Access feature offers users an exciting way to authenticate and gain visibility of network endpoints via Meraki Systems Manager and MR access points.
How Does Cisco Meraki’s Trusted Access Work?
Trusted Access works via MR access points and Meraki Systems Manager to grant secure network access to devices that do not have an MDM profile. Administrators can apply existing user profiles and permissions to new devices to avoid creating new MDM profiles for every new endpoint. For example, a system administrator could grant secure network access to an employee’s personal phone by pulling the employee’s profile via Active Directory and applying it to the device.
Further, Trusted Access is built into the Meraki dashboard and provides full transparency into who is attempting to connect, the device they’re attempting to connect to and when that connection attempt was made.
How Trusted Access Improves Functionality
This endpoint monitoring, combined with methods that prevent access to sensitive data and applications like Trusted Access’ MDM features, serves as another layer of protection. By keeping watch over network devices, IT teams are able to respond rapidly to any intrusion or suspicious activity. From the dashboard, suspicious devices can be denied access, stopping hacking attempts in their tracks.
What’s more, Trusted Access is great for reducing IT workflow. Foregoing profile creation for every new endpoint connecting to the network saves IT time and prevents user error in tedious profile creation. Mapping user profiles to new devices also makes for more clear and robust visibility into each user by consolidating their devices under their profile.
The process is simple on the end-user side as well. Users will receive a link to their mobile device that allows them to sign in, download a certificate and, pending authentication from the system, access the network.
Simplify MDM with Meraki
Overall, Meraki’s new feature simplifies MDM by applying existing user profiles to new endpoints. This streamlined MDM feature, increased endpoint security and integration with the Meraki dashboard improve efficiency and afford administrators effective tools to combat the rise of cybersecurity incidents.