Page 22 - Cyber Defense eMagazine April 2021 Edition

hether it’s a phishing scam targeting unsuspecting employees, malware on critical infrastructure or
Wanother type of malicious breach, cyber-attacks have been an all-too-familiar danger, and numbers
are only growing. Of course, with each passing year, these threats not only increase in quantity, but also
complexity and sophistication.

For instance, the recent explosion of work from home network traffic and mainstream adoption of cloud
services has led to many telling trends, such as a 630% increase in threats targeting cloud services. And
similar trends are likely to continue as digital ecosystems continue to grow with a plethora of new and
increasingly sophisticated connected devices.

So, what can be done to protect against these increasing threats? One relatively simple step could be to
separate network management from the primary network processing user data traffic.

The costs of a vulnerable network management plane

When organizational networks are not resilient, businesses are often blindsided by attacks, leaving everyone
scrambling and operations crashing to a halt. Adding gravity to the situation, costs from an outage could be
crippling. In fact, an Opengear survey recently showed that nearly 1/3 of organizations lose more than $1
million from network outages each year.

22 Cyber Defense eMagazine – April 2021 Edition
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