How to protect expansive networks to ensure better results
The increasing cost and growing prevalence of cyberattacks has many Australian and New Zealand businesses on edge. From ransomware and disruptionware to business email compromise and phishing attacks, businesses are trying to protect their expanding and increasingly complex networks with more certainty and without compromising performance, flexibility, or user experience.
The answer is to overlay a comprehensive and integrated security fabric across the business to avoid blind spots and keep users and the organisation safe.
More people are working from home, organisations are leveraging the cloud and even multicloud environments, and employee expectations are rising when it comes to their user experience.
They demand seamless access to company systems and data from any location, with a consumer-like interface that never lets them down. When companies can provide all of this, productivity and employee engagement rise and the business can perform more strongly.
The growing reliance on digital systems means the attack surface has grown, and organisations are more vulnerable than ever. They don't have enough visibility or control over their networks to maintain a truly secure posture. If they attempt to lock systems down for increased security, they often pay the price in terms of performance and user experience.
Many organisations have adopted software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) in response to some of these challenges. This solution helps prioritise and manage network traffic so that performance remains robust and resilient, applications behave the way users expect, and downtime is significantly limited. However, without security built into SD-WAN, this can create more security risks for an organisation.
Organisations need to choose a secure SD-WAN solution. A truly secure solution must be based on a next-generation firewall (NGFW) with networking capability overlaid, rather than a networking solution with security bolted on afterwards.
Choosing the right secure SD-WAN solution can help organisations get the flexibility and performance they require alongside consistent, overarching security.
Many organisations have moved to a public cloud or multicloud model with or without SD-WAN. Cloud solutions are helping businesses transform faster and let their employees access critical systems from anywhere. However, securing these multicloud environments often ends up creating a series of unconnected security siloes, leading to potential blind spots and gaps.
Organisations need a homogenous security solution to protect the entire multicloud environment from end to end. Otherwise, they face a significant risk of being attacked through gaps in their cloud security.
When looking for a cloud security solution, organisations should choose one that operates natively on every cloud platform and uses custom-built, turnkey cloud connectors for seamless orchestration and consistent policy enforcement for data and applications as they move between multiple clouds.
For example, one company provides a fully integrated set of components that provides end-to-end security across an organisation's disparate environments without introducing siloes or blind spots.
Organisations looking to continue expanding the way they operate in an uncertain landscape must ensure first and foremost that their networks, systems, applications, data, and users are secure. The proliferation of cyber threats means that there is risk everywhere. Businesses need to mitigate that risk with integrated security solutions to let them operate with confidence and assurance that they'll be protected.
Article by Fortinet distributor, Wavelink CEO, Ilan Rubin.
