Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - The benefits of converged cloud security

Cyber security is changing fast. Businesses face mounting threats as their data, users, and work rapidly spread outside traditional office walls - a shift dramatically accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to Matt Band, Senior Sales Engineer and Solutions Architect at Forcepoint, the increased adoption of remote working has put pressure on organisations to rethink how they protect vital company assets. "The requirements have changed a little bit from some users working remotely to all users working remotely," he said. "Users are now accessing from anywhere and everywhere - generally from home. They're not so much located in their corporate environments anymore. Yet organisations need to be able to provide the same levels of protection to those users - sometimes more."

Forcepoint, a cyber security and data protection firm, has built its reputation on providing what it describes as a "converged cloud security service." But what does that mean, and why does it matter now more than ever?

Band explained that, historically, businesses have tackled cyber security by purchasing a range of separate, 'point solutions' for everything from firewalls to antivirus. "There's a lot of point solutions in the market around cyber security - a lot of different vendors, a lot of different products. For organisations to take advantage of that, there's a lot of complexity involved. A lot of products to learn," he said.

This complexity has created headaches for IT teams. "What we're seeing is more a move in the market towards cloud delivery solutions - converged cloud platforms. Taking the complexity out of a cyber security solution and giving a simplistic approach. Giving one place to manage a platform, one place for administrators to admin the platform, one place for businesses to purchase platforms from," Band said.

This trend was already underway, but the pandemic dramatically hastened its arrival. "The pandemic has obviously exacerbated that. The requirement now, more than ever, is to basically deliver a platform that is consumable and can protect users regardless of their location," Band added.

The result: a surge in interest in 'converged' solutions, which combine multiple security functions - such as web gateways, malware detection, data loss prevention, and network protection - into a single, cloud-delivered platform.

Forcepoint is just one of the providers betting big on this vision. Band explained that its cloud offering amalgamates its range of security technologies into one management platform. "What we've been able to do is culminate those solutions into one management platform - one place to go to basically deploy for organisations across their environment for user and data protection." He added, "It integrates technologies such as secure web gateway or proxy, advanced malware detection, zero-day threat analysis, and enterprise data loss prevention."

A key feature, Band pointed out, is the ability to deploy these critical security measures via the cloud, without the need to route all user traffic back to a central corporate network - a costly and sometimes unworkable approach in the remote work era.

"Traditionally, you would have to deploy things on a corporate network and route users back into that network," Band explained. "Whereas what we've brought to the market to solve these use cases is the ability to deploy these type of solutions as a cloud-delivered solution. Meaning no requirement to route all traffic back onto corporate networks anymore."

One particularly innovative addition is remote browser isolation. "So, the ability to detonate these sites or locations in a fully secured location without any of that information touching the end user's system is significant at the moment as well. It's a very good talking point for us," Band said.

He is confident that converged security will rapidly become the industry norm, a view supported by analysts like Gartner. Band referenced Gartner's Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework, which describes a new generation of security services delivered entirely from the cloud.

"Gartner has recognised this as a key market and they've framed a market around this called SASE - Secure Access Service Edge. Data is really moving to cloud locations, whether it's public cloud or applications that are consumed as SaaS. All this data is stored anywhere and everywhere and the users accessing that information are anywhere and everywhere," he said.

This raises a new challenge: the traditional corporate perimeter is all but gone. Security now needs to follow both the data and users wherever they go. "The traditional approach of routing users back on-premise and providing a security stack is disappearing. What we're seeing in the market is the need to extend an organisation's edge of the network to the cloud," Band stated.

He says Forcepoint's converged solution allows businesses to "secure any cloud application, provide enterprise data protection around that, and also enable remote browser isolation." Crucially, it can provide protection to both corporate applications and any consumer-grade SaaS platform staff may use.

Band summed up the current moment as a turning point. "The requirement of organisations to not so much route traffic back on-premise but secure applications - and the data held within that - is really key right now," he said.

As hybrid and remote working becomes embedded in business culture, Band believes those who don't embrace this shift will be left behind. "The Forcepoint solution is able to do that," he said, adding, "We're protecting and enabling users to access on-premise or corporate applications as well as any consumer SaaS application as well. That's a great place in the market for us to be."

Reflecting on the ongoing changes, Band emphasised, "It's great to be here."