The Growing Need for a New Security Platform

 The Growing Need for a New Security Platform

The idea of a security platform is not new. Neither are the issues related to security and vendor sprawl inside  he an organization. The original idea behind the Next-Gen Firewall was to blend several products into a single platform to reduce IT overhead and simplify wiring closets that had been overrun with security devices. And it worked. NGFW solutions quickly became the cornerstone for security implementations in virtually every organization in the world.

There were still challenges, however. Interoperability was one. For many of these solutions, the various technologies — usually some combination of a firewall, IPS, VPN, web filtering, AV, and sandbox solution —didn’t really work together as a single seamless solution. Many components used different operating systems and even had separate management consoles. Another issue was the quality of the solutions embedded in the platform. A security vendor that built an NGFW platform may have had a top-notch firewall to use as an anchor solution, but then filled in the security roster with a second-rate IPS or web filtering solution. Debates raged about the value of an NGFW platform and a best-of-breed security approach.

Today, digital innovation has forced a complete upheaval of the traditional network. Multi-cloud environments, data centers comprised of both physical and virtual infrastructures, distributed branch offices, mobile workers, and home offices have fragmented the traditional perimeter and broken the traditional security model of placing an NGFW solution at the network edge to watch traffic moving back and forth across the border. Each new network environment now comes with its unique requirements and challenges, and as a result, security solutions have begun to pop up like mushrooms across the network. This has created a level of complexity in terms of deployment, optimization, and management that has overwhelmed most IT teams. It’s a problem that the traditional security platform approach is unable to address.

According to a recent IBM survey, an enterprise now has an average of 45 security tools deployed inside their organization. And worse, each incident they need to respond to requires coordination across 19 different tools. Unfortunately, these tools are not natively designed for this sort of interoperability. Organizations are once again struggling with vendor and solution sprawl, are forced to hand-correlate threat intelligence, and are hamstrung in their ability to implement any sort of automation to simplify the process. It’s part of the reason why dwell time for security breaches is now measured in months, and why the cost of a security breach is now north of $8.6 million per data breach in the US, according to IBM.

The Need for a New Security Platform

What’s needed is a new approach to the security platform. One that weaves all of the critical security functionality organizations needed into a unified solution that can protect the entire network and enable any user on any device to securely access any data or application no matter where it is located. But to make it work in today’s distributed network environments, we need to solve the problems of the first iteration of this approach. And for that to happen, an effective security platform needs to be built around three critical concepts: it must be broad, integrated, and automated.

A Platform that can be Deployed Anywhere

For a security platform to be effective, it needs to be deployed consistently and easily at every edge, whether for traditional or highly distributed data centers, public cloud environments, or branch offices and retail locations. And because of the growth in IoT devices, home offices, and off-network mobile users, it needs to extend to th…hreat Intelligence (CTI), 2021-2030.

-By John Maddison