Moving toward an intelligent hybrid security model
Cyber attacks aren’t slowing down – in fact, 76 percent of organizations have experienced a breach within the last two years. Enterprises of all sizes, across every industry, are challenged to respond to increasingly complex and severe attacks – often only learning about the size, severity, and type of incident they’re dealing with as their security teams work to stop them.
Many organizations continue to maintain a reactive approach – implementing stand-alone point solutions that only fragment and silo security efforts.
NSFOCUS recommends an intelligent hybrid security approach based on harnessing true global threat intelligence across an organization’s cyber defenses (hybrid cloud and on-premises), and turning that insight into action – to proactively and holistically protect assets across the organization.
“Cybercriminals have been trying to gain access to protected networks since the dawn of the Internet,” said Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst at NSFOCUS. “In response, security teams implement counter-measures to try and keep them at bay – like anti-virus, DDoS defenses, intrusion preventions systems, web application firewalls, and a host of other security technologies. This segmented approach has led to visibility tools like log aggregators, SIEMs, and traffic analyzers – but has proven to be a poor attempt to get a holistic look at the threat landscape. In reality, these solutions have created security silos that require specialized teams, and result in a limited, expensive and ineffective approach to security.”
Steps toward an intelligent hybrid security model
NSFOCUS advises enterprises to move toward an intelligent hybrid security model by taking the following steps:
1. Automate threat intelligence: Consume real-time global threat intelligence and put it into action across all of the security technologies deployed within the enterprise, in an automated fashion that requires no human interaction.
2. Eliminate silos with integrated defenses: Deploy defenses that interoperate with and are fully aware of the other defenses in place, communicating vertically with the cloud and laterally across the entire enterprise, helping eliminate security silos and fragmented approaches.
3. Identify security blind spots: Implement closed-loop threat intelligence feedback for both cloud and on-premises defenses that removes blind spots and significantly reduce the time from measure to counter-measure, infection to detection.
4. Take an intelligent look across the network: Execute on a vision of an intelligent ecosystem of threat-aware solutions combined into a single entity that dramatically increases the visibility of the entire network and application landscape in the enterprise.
“Security departments have spent countless amounts of money trying to undo the damage caused by hackers, while simultaneously bleeding their budget in a futile effort to proactively protect themselves from increasingly malicious campaigns,” said Allan Thompson, Chief Operating Officer, NSFOCUS. “It is no longer enough to implement disparate security solutions and hope that they will work together. If organizations aren’t looking at security holistically, taking an intelligent hybrid approach, and working to get ahead of attacks using real, actionable threat intelligence, they will continue to remain vulnerable and at great risk.”