It’s bee more than two years since the pandemic pushed businesses to shift into digital. However, thriving in the digital world isn’t an easy feat. Organizations accelerating their digital initiatives to greater heights also makes them more vulnerable to cyber threats.
What are the these threats? and how can businesses secure their complex and distributed networks from cybercriminals?
A recent webinar, “Secure Your Digital Acceleration with Fortinet Security Fabric,” organized by Fortinet, a global leader in comprehensive, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, Fortinet Philippines discussed why businesses must leverage a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) for their digital acceleration initiatives.
Trends across organizations amid the pandemic
According to Fortinet Philippines, the closures of most workplaces amid the pandemic prompted employers to adopt a work-from-anywhere setup for their employees. In a recently study by the Boston Consulting Group and the The Network, it was revealed that this setup is expected to continue as 89% of the 208,807 respondents across 190 countries prefer remote or hybrid work post-pandemic.
To both support this new working environment and cater to consumers’ digital needs, businesses accelerated their digital transformation. For example, organizations began migrating the applications inside their on-premises data centers onto the cloud environment, and so on.
Such initiatives further expand digital attack surfaces, increase sophisticated cyber threats, and provide a complex ecosystem for every organization. It also puts the cybersecurity skills gap as one of the main concerns of businesses in today’s world.
A report published by Gartner also states that organizations will spend an estimated $170 billion on cybersecurity by 2022. However, Cybersecurity Ventures revealed that the costs of cybercrimes worldwide will reach $10.5 trillion every year by 2025.
Challenges of best-of-breed point products
Thanks to businesses’ digital acceleration efforts, networks are becoming more complex and distributed. It is for that reason that detecting and responding to threats is a challenge for organizations. While businesses can enhance their security posture and strategy with the best-of-breed security tools, that alone is not enough.
“These point products work in silos and represent a center of focus and expertise. Without integrating these security tools, it can lead to security sprawl that makes management difficult, disrupts visibility, and impedes an organization’s ability to act effectively to cyber threats.”
– Louie Castañeda, Country Manager of Fortinet Philippines
The webinar discussed that businesses could get solutions, such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), to integrate these best-of-breed security tools. For instance, FortiSIEM unifies data collection and analytics from diverse information sources, including logs, performance metrics, security alerts, and configuration changes. Meanwhile, FortiSOAR centralizes tools and amplifies the efforts of security teams, empowering them to respond rapidly, automate tasks, and execute actions across the businesses’ security stack.
For more advanced and sophisticated threats, businesses need to adopt a broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity mesh platform for robust, scalable, and manageable security deployments.
Adopting a CSMA
Gartner defines the cybersecurity mesh as “a modern conceptual approach to a security architecture that enables the distributed enterprise to deploy and extend security where it is most needed.”
Expounding on the mesh concept, Fortinet Philippines explained that “the CSMA is not a solution or a product to be integrated, but is an architectural approach that organizations can adopt. It tries to solve long-standing challenges of distinct security tools by integrating them so they can collaborate and dynamically respond to cyberattacks.”
CSMA has three characteristics. It is agile, providing a composable architectural approach to integrate security controls, distributed, encouraging and enabling decentralized security controls to protect all attack surfaces while being collaborative. Allowing for an environment to integrate composable security services and teams to interact and work with each other.
During the session, CSMA was also described to have four layers to enable collaborative and agile cybersecurity for businesses. The first one is security analytics and intelligence, a layer that combines different security tools’ data and insight to deliver deep threat analyses and the correct response to cyberattacks. Then, distributed identity fabric, a layer that provides critical identity services to manage increasing assets, devices, and identities.
Next is consolidated policy and posture management, a layer enabling organizations to translate central policies to the native configurations of security tools. Finally, it also has consolidated dashboards, a layer that provides a single-pane-of-glass security system.
Make CSMA possible with the Fortinet Security Fabric
All these are aligned with the Fortinet Security Fabric, the industry’s highest-performing cybersecurity mesh platform that integrates all cybersecurity solutions to reduce management complexity and share threat intelligence. It provides broad visibility and protection of all digital attack surfaces to manage risks and also provides automated self-healing networks with AI-driven security for fast and efficient operations.
Fortinet provides a wide array of solutions across the Fortinet Security Fabric’s four pillars. It includes security-driven networking, zero-trust access, adaptive cloud security, and AI-driven security operations. It has FortiGuard Security Services that enables sharing and distribution of threat intelligence across Fortinet’s solutions and third-party technology partners.
Due to its Fabric Management Center, the security fabric also allows centralized management, logging and reporting. And as Fortinet has more than 450 third-party technology partners that can integrate with its security fabric, it gives and supports a broad and open ecosystem, which breaks down technology and vendor silos.
“The CSMA is the proposed strategic security platform of Gartner. At Fortinet, we call this the Fortinet Security Fabric that enables deep visibility across all edges, centralized management of distributed solutions, consistent enforcement of policies, real-time global threat intelligence, automated responses, and open ecosystem,” Castañeda concluded.
Emman has been writing technical and feature articles since 2010. Prior to this, he became one of the instructors at Asia Pacific College in 2008, and eventually landed a job as Business Analyst and Technical Writer at Integrated Open Source Solutions for almost 3 years.
