How a Leading Digital Innovator Protects Consultants and Clients

Protecting a dynamic workforce and client trust

With corporate parents like Microsoft and Accenture, IT consultancy Avanade was literally born to deliver digital innovation and results for clients and their customers through the Microsoft ecosystem. 4,000 clients in 24 countries later and now the #1 Microsoft services company in the world, Avanade is creating the digital future, which at times entails first overcoming the limitations of the digital present and recent past.

The future of work is heading outside of the office. To be most effective for clients, the vast majority of professionals work outside of offices at client sites, airports, hotels, and everywhere else they can leverage the cloud to deliver the ubiquity clients need.

A highly mobile workforce means that it’s very difficult to use traditional security methods to protect endpoints, workstations, and clients, since it’s very difficult to enforce mechanisms and security controls when users are off the corporate network, Security solutions like firewalls or web proxies don’t help protect endpoints when they’re not actually in the office, which created unacceptable risk.

Avanade

Avanade is a global professional services company providing IT consulting and services focused on the Microsoft platform with artificial intelligence, business analytics, cloud, application services, digital transformation, modern workplace, security services, technology, and managed services offerings. Headquartered in Seattle, the company has 50,000 employees in 26 countries. Avanade serves 34% of the Fortune 500 and 46% of the Fortune Global 500.

Visibility and protection everywhere

Identifying and implementing the best security solutions for our workforce can be challenging, since we need tools that are flexible, allow us to work anywhere, and don’t impede our ability to deliver to our clients. Cisco Umbrella met our criteria.”

Avanade was able to quickly deploy Umbrella globally. The agent out with a standard deployment tool configured it in the cloud, and in almost no time, Umbrella was effectively protecting users wherever they work. And, because it’s a cloud-delivered service, don’t have to install appliances in a data center or do a lot of configuration.”

The Umbrella Roaming Client also gave the ability to create and apply multiple policies to select devices, so could satisfy client requests to implement differentiated protections, without ever touching the client’s hardware.

For Paradi, DNS-level security offered an unmatchable benefit: “Umbrella leverages the power of big data in the cloud to deliver unparalleled visibility and protection. Umbrella sees not only our traffic but traffic from thousands of other customers across millions of different endpoints, so it blocks malicious traffic before any one of our users even has the chance to spot it.”