Today’s newer technologies—including multi-cloud, 5G, distributed compute, off-network devices, and converged OT networks—continue to disintegrate the traditional notion of the edge at the data center, WAN, and LAN. While this is happening, the global remote work mandate has created a massive and largely under-secured home edge. When working in the office, employees were used to high-performance applications, rapid access to information, customized experiences, and instant collaboration; remote employees need these same capabilities.
The modern network has become increasingly difficult to secure due to the proliferation of all of these new and unique edge environments. Many organizations have taken a haphazard approach to security, without any unifying security strategy or framework. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of this fragmented security strategy and employing increasingly sophisticated malware to breach networks.
Maintaining network-wide visibility and consistent policy enforcement is almost impossible because of this vendor and solutions sprawl. In a recent survey, organizations reported deploying an average of 45 different solutions, and threat events needed to be coordinated by at least 19 different devices. Even simply maintaining and monitoring all the various security solutions is taxing already overburdened IT staff. Channel partners have an opportunity in the midst of this challenge to guide customers toward a framework that reduces complexity while securing all edges.
Comprehensive Security
Building a dynamic and responsive network and then adding security on top of it is a complex undertaking. It’s even more difficult when organizations are using legacy solutions and strategies. The concept of security-driven networking is based on the idea that networking and security shouldn’t be siloed. Rather, they should be integrated into an IT infrastructure that takes into account the network, endpoints and devices, and cloud and applications, end to end. By weaving security and networking together, security no longer functions as an overlay. Instead, security solutions are deeply aware of networking functions and can adjust configurations, policies, and protocols on the fly to ensure continuous protection and consistent enforcement.
The Purpose of a Platform
Channel partners are starting to consider integrated solutions or platforms to address the rapidly expanding attack surface their end customers face. But what does that actually mean? For the most part, the security industry has failed to deliver the kinds of platforms and services that today’s changing networks require. Instead, most security vendors are focused on delivering a single slice of security.
However, not all platforms answer to this description. A carefully crafted platform can offer distinct advantages in terms of deploying, managing, and running security solutions. Core to any effective platform is a common foundation that ties all of the security and networking components together to ensure tight integration throughout the entire infrastructure, including hybrid deployments of hardware, software, and everything-as-a-service versions of the platform.
Using this model, managed IT service providers are able to stay in step with networking and security changes at their clients’ businesses. It also provides holistic visibility across the entire network, correlating and analyzing data from distributed networking and security devices. Working with all of the various connected systems, deployed everywhere across the network, the platform can better detect threats and launch coordinated responses to cyberattacks.
This kind of framework allows enterprises to deploy security solutions anywhere, regardless of their form factor or the network they run on. The solutions can still see each other, share threat intelligence, and coordinate a unified response to threats. And because the platform is based on common standards and open APIs, hundreds of solutions from third-party vendors can be integrated into it.
Advanced, automated attacks on the network occur faster than the best human security professional’s ability to respond. That’s why security systems need to not only detect, investigate, and respond to threats in real time, but also monitor the network to confirm that connections are stable, applications are optimized, and dynamic changes don’t create security gaps. To ensure the best possible response times, advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning also need to be part of the security platform, enabling it to see, respond to, and even anticipate needs at digital speeds.
Security to Meet the Challenge
As channel partners shift toward a security platform model, they must understand that a platform needs to take everything into account versus focusing on just one area. A platform can’t be just for endpoints, or in the network, or across the cloud. It needs to span all areas of the network, working consistently end to end, and be augmented using identity and threat intelligence.
Building a single, universal foundation allows many security solutions to interact and interoperate seamlessly across all environments. This model safeguards the end customer by using one source of unified threat intelligence—removing gaps in network security and strengthening responses to security incidents. When a platform is able to run natively in any environment, distributed security expands with the threat environment and protects applications, data, and devices in an automated, integrated way. Channel partners who offer this approach will help their customers meet and even exceed evolving security challenges.
JON BOVE is vice president of channel sales at Fortinet.
