Cybersecurity is a challenge that all organisations will face for years to come. Especially in this era of the digital economy, work-from-home and digital acceleration. Not to mention that there are now new attack vectors and new threats like AI-enabled attacks, for instance. Bad actors are always looking to improvise too, therefore, companies must also evolve in response.
Speaking of threats to cybersecurity, ransomware is another growing menace facing organisations worldwide. A study in 2021, shows that ransomware is the topmost concern compared to other threats. 67% reported having been a target of ransomware while half of that percentage experienced repeated attacks.
These sort of statistics should not be surprising to many as many businesses rapidly adopt hybrid or multi-cloud environments to store their data, but many fail to recognise the security risks that comes with it. Corporate networks and security perimeters are ever expanding, especially with the recent trends of remote working and employees increasingly using their personal devices for working purposes.
As businesses take steps to improve their defences, deploying new solutions from different vendors to cover the gaps, new vulnerabilities arise, putting their organisation at greater risk. This is a classic example of “too much of a good thing”, as security tool overload complicates management, creates inefficiencies, and reduces visibility, limiting the organisation’s capability to see and respond to incoming attacks. The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reported that organisations, on average, manage between 25 to 49 security tools from up to 10 different vendors. Without a way to effectively gel it all together, just imagine the chaos!
For these exact reasons, Gartner recommends the Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA) and even goes as far as professing that it will be one of the top strategic technology trends for 2022.
CSMA is a composable and scalable cybersecurity approach where a wide range of security tools are integrated into a cooperative, interoperable, and dynamic ecosystem.
The flexibility of CSMA fits well in a multi-cloud environment. Unlike traditional security controls that operate in siloes, CSMA allows the controls to interoperate between layers. The layers for example, are policy management, security intelligence, identity fabric and others.
Legacy approaches used to juggle disparate security systems with tools that are simply not adequate to protect against the present attacks, especially in today’s diverse IT environments. Whether your data is on-prem, at the edge or in the cloud, CSMA has it covered. We must acknowledge that users, devices and data have all moved beyond the traditional offices or data centres. We can’t simply pinpoint that anything outside the security perimeter is bad and anything inside it is safe.
On the other hand, while CSMA is seen as a rising trend going into 2022, Fortinet has already spearheaded this approach for more than a decade in the form of the Fortinet Security Fabric. In that sense, Fortinet is ahead of its time with this platform, calling it the “highest-performing cybersecurity mesh platform in the industry”, designed with the purpose of reducing complexity and increasing the effectiveness of overall security.
Fortinet Security Fabric has three elements that allow the platform to deliver advanced security capabilities:
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Broad: It has a wide portfolio spanning into the digital environment of users, clouds, edges and endpoints. This is so the security perimeter will be equipped with threat detection and policy enforcement.
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Integration: Reduces complexity by having the tasks performed under one singular, integrated system. This is to ensure high performance and complete visibility across the digital attack surface.
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Automation: Cyber defence can a be task that is inhumanely impossible to execute without time and necessary staffing. This system carries an aware, self-healing system and advanced AI to do attack prevention at a higher speed in less time with increased efficiency.
This system has around 50 security and networking technologies designed to interoperate regarding coordination, threat intelligence, correlating data, as well as responding to threats automatically.
Fortinet brought forward the notion of convergence of security and networking with the innovation of Secure SD-WAN. Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) is an infrastructure which allow businesses to secure the network by using a single operating system and centralised management console.
Fortinet’s mesh platform currently is able to integrate and interoperate more than 450 third-party technologies that partnered with Fortinet. This ecosystem will allow enterprises to keep their existing tools and technologies that they have invested in before moving on to Fortinet Security Fabric.
Both CSMA and Fortinet Security Fabric are similar in their approach. It is just that Fortinet’s platform has advanced beyond an idea. It is here and working, and you won’t have to wait until 2024 to get your hands on it.
To find out more about how the Fortinet Security Fabric can give your organisation an integrated approach to security, as part of your digital acceleration initiatives, click here.