16 May 2024

Jon Taylor, director and principal of security, Versa Networks

What’s the impact?

In response to this new reality, organisations often create bespoke architectures of legacy security solutions that result in greater complexity. They end up with something cobbled together that is difficult to integrate and manage, leading to performance issues and alert overload. These common constructs of daisy-chained point products decrease visibility and increase latency, which are determinantal to the user experience.

Administrators and analysts become negatively impacted since they must cope with isolated policies configured and/or deployed on each device. This requires correlating mountains of data across multiple disparate systems. To expedite this task, organisations will deploy a SIEM which still requires specialized configurations and staff to validate alerts and eliminate false positive/negative incidents. Other tools, such as a SOAR platform, are also needed to initiate an automated response and perform automated remediation.

Ultimately, this chain of complexity creates more gaps that can be exploited by threat actors, phishing threats, advanced malware, and ransomware attacks.

What’s the solution?

Cloud adoption and hybrid work models now require an adaptable, high-performance network, something legacy approaches can’t deliver for the right price-performance. By unifying security and networking at the edge, where it can be most efficient and useful, organisations can reduce their risk, increase their agility, and improve the user experience.

5 tips for adapting and securing your network

1. Adopt a unified platform approach to simplify how entities connect to resources while being protected no matter where they geographically exist.
2. Consider a multi-tenant network stack to segment traffic that would seamlessly integrate into the existing environment and can be delivered from the cloud, on-premises, or as a blended combination of both.
3. Look for security solutions that are built into a platform and not bolted on to create better visibility and a strengthened security posture.
4. Utilize a hardware-agnostic approach for selecting software capacity independent of hardware capacity, so you can future proof all sites.
5. Implement a software-defined approach that enables you to rapidly respond to threats and seamlessly scale to thousands of sites.

Keep in mind that security solutions, especially those that inspect traffic or data in real-time like intrusion prevention systems, web proxies, or antivirus software, can introduce latency. If this latency is perceptible to users, it can reduce system or network performance and lead to dissatisfaction. The importance of prioritising the user experience can’t be overstated, especially in the context of security.

As organisations accelerate their digital transformation journeys, it is crucial to implement a robust security strategy from the start that evolves as rapidly as the business. The traditional castle-and-moat approach is no longer sufficient as cloud adoption, hybrid work, and digital engagement expand the attack surface. An integrated approach eliminates complexities, reduces costs, and improves security efficacy.