Fortinet,
the global leader in high-performance cyber security solutions, cautions APAC
organisations that traditional security solutions are no longer adequate in
protecting today’s agile and highly distributed cloud environments and
expanding attack surfaces.
While
cloud service providers offer compelling new services, they also create
isolated data silos that have to be managed separately, and impose unique
security requirements on organizations. IT teams are already overburdened with
managing their network transformation, and now must also learn how to deploy, configure,
monitor, and manage dozens of additional cloud security tools.
The lack of additional resources, combined with the
growing security skills gap, leaves security technicians with no good way to
establish consistent policy enforcement or correlate the threat intelligence
each of these devices produces. The result, in many
cases, is that today’s hybrid cloud environments are recreating the same data
center security sprawl that organizations have spent years trying to streamline
and consolidate.
“For many
organizations, their cloud-based infrastructure and services have become a
blind spot in their security strategy. And cybercriminals are prepared to take
advantage of this,” said Michael Xie,
Founder, President and CTO for Fortinet. “A critical lapse in visibility or control in any
part of the distributed network, especially in the cloud, can spell disaster
for a digital business and have repercussions across the emerging global
digital economy.”
The cloud has
been a powerfully disruptive technology, transforming traditional network
architectures that have been in place for decades. Housing workloads on cloud
have allowed local businesses to be more agile, responsive and available than
ever before. Networking experts predict that by
2020, cloud data centres will house as much as 92 percent of all workloads.According to Gartner, total
spending for public cloud services in Asia Pacific is expected to increase to
US$12.4 billion by 2019 with Software as a Service (SaaS) being the most
progressive segment of the market with a growth rate of 22.5 percent and forecasted
revenue of US$1.67 billion. (Source: Gartner)
So
while organizations are re-engineering their networks, they have also begun to
retool their security model and solutions. Security budgets for existing
traditional networks are being reassigned to the adoption of specialized
security tools, such as data center protection, web application firewalls,
security for mobile devices, thin clients, secure email gateways, advanced
threat protection, and sandboxes.
Fortinet
advocates
an integrated Security Fabric strategy that ensures data and security elements across an organization’s
various cloud environments are integrated, cohesive and coherent, like a
seamlessly woven fabric. Such a strategy allows companies to see, control,
integrate and manage the security of their data across the hybrid cloud,
thereby enabling them to take better advantage of the economics and elasticity
provided by a highly distributed cloud environment.
Fortinet’s Security Fabric
addressses three fundamental
requirements necessary to meet today’s advanced networking and security
requirements of the cloud:
1. Integration
Security,
network and cloud-based tools need to work together as a single system to
enhance visibility and correlate and share threat intelligence.
2. Synchronization
Security solutions
need to work as a unified system for simplified single-pane-of-glass management
and analysis, and enabling coordinated responses to threats through such
methods as isolating affected devices, dynamically partitioning network
segments, updating rules and removing malware.
3. Automation
For security solutions
to adapt to dynamically changing network configurations and respond in real
time to detected threats, security measures and countermeasures need to be
applied automatically, regardless of where a threat originates, from remote
devices to the cloud.
“To
securely meet today’s digital business requirements, organizations need to be
able to cut through the cloud security hype and intentionally select security
solutions designed to be part of an interconnected, end-to-end security
framework that can solve evolving physical and virtual IT challenges regardless
of the deployment option. Security needs to be designed to meet this new
challenge not only now, but into tomorrow as organizations continue to evolve
towards a fully digital business model,” said Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice
President, India & SAARC, Fortinet.