How to Boost your Agility with End-to-End IT Security
It has been almost impossible to escape the news around high profile security breaches over the past couple of years. The world’s biggest brands are under attack by organized and heavily funded cyber-criminal organizations, and it seems as though they are losing the battle. SonicWall Security has written blogs about new, innovative, and highly effective methods of attacking due to compromised websites, memory scraping, attacks leveraging email and more. According to the recently published 2015 SonicWall Security Threat Report, the number of new point-of-sale countermeasures put in place in 2014 was 3X greater than the previous year. IT security professionals are under intense pressure to ensure that the risk profile of the organization is minimized, and the rapidly evolving threat landscape dramatically complicates this situation. The 2015 SonicWall Global Technology Adoption Index shows that IT decision makers consider security the biggest barrier to expanding mobile technologies, using cloud computing and leveraging big data. At SonicWall, we want security to be an enabler of agility, not a barrier.
But, the reality is that current approaches to security just aren’t working. Organizations simply cannot continue to spend more money buying the latest technology in an attempt to patch and cobble their way to a secure organization. Each solution that is purchased creates a learning curve for IT, adds to the complexity of the infrastructure, and opens up potential gaps in coverage that attackers are able to exploit. I believe that it is the security industry’s fundamental responsibility to develop solutions that close these gaps. By designing end-to-end solutions that automate the complicated parts of security, we are able to make it much easier for our customers to ensure that the organization is protected against the latest evolving threats.
At SonicWall, we call this connected security, and this is a major initiative that drives interaction between our product groups. As an example, last year we rolled out firewall-enforced file encryption. SonicWall Data Protection and Encryption (DDPE) is an application that provides file encryption and is offered as an option on business-class PCs that we sell. Encryption is a fantastic security tool and in the future we expect to see more and more encryption being used, not only on data at rest on computers but also for data in-flight on the Internet. However like many security measures, encryption is only useful if it is turned on, and the risk to the organization if it isn’t turned on is too great to ignore. So, we developed a solution for customers who use both SonicWall encryption and SonicWall firewalls. With a simple checkbox in the SonicWall firewall user interface, IT can turn on enforcement of DDPE clients. This means that the firewall automatically checks communications from any computers either on the internal network or trying to access the network remotely for VPN. If the DDPE encryption application isn’t present, the user will not be allowed to send files into or out of the organization. And, they are automatically redirected to a download server to obtain the DDPE software. So, risk is minimized because encryption is enforced. And IT is now enabling the organization instead of hindering the ability to make progress. This is just one example of how end-to-end security makes your organization agile.
We believe that if we can take care of the heavy lifting in security, our customers will be able to focus on their core business, or those things which make them profitable. By architecting our solutions to work together, we can help minimize the risk profile and ultimately turn security from a barrier into an enabler, allowing our customers to be ready for whatever the future holds. To learn more about leveraging IT security to help your organization succeed, download the tech brief titled “The AAA approach to network security”.
