Page 37 - Cyber Defense eMagazine for July 2020

P. 37

access to remote employees, and this has meant the rapid adoption of cloud technologies and
subsequent creation of a host of new issues that security providers must now respond to.

Overloaded networks on traditional architecture experience high latency, and each new employee
connecting to the resources they need to work slows down the connection speed of his or her peers.
Performance is small potatoes, though. IT teams are more overwhelmed with the number and variety of
different devices and unfamiliar sources of traffic, and security leaders are racing to provide a better
solution than what was available just last year.

IT Still Catching Up Cloud-Wise

Many cloud services tied into local environments and available to many remote workers (often from
personal Wi-Fi connections with dubious security) create gaps where exposure occurs, even due to small
issues such as how they’re configured. A business’s resources may be secure but the wrong box ticked
in the admin panel of a cloud-based service is enough to open cracks that need just a bit of pressure to
widen into a breach.

Sensitive data is also exchanging more hands faster than ever, during a time when hackers are ramping
up their activities to take advantage of the pandemic panic. Under these conditions, orchestrating a stack
of traditional security products isn’t enough, even if they can be deployed in a way that secures the
network on paper. We don’t live on paper. In reality, the tool sprawl approach creates maintenance issues
that the security industry must address alongside classic ideas like threat detection and visibility.

For IT, planning security for in-office infrastructure is simpler, because all employees are always
connecting from the same devices, locations, and IP addresses. Very few security “profiles” need to be
built, so even with an unwieldy and piecemeal stack of different security tools, smart network access
doesn’t need to be scalable. Once network traffic moves from inside the office to outside, however, each
remote worker represents a unique threat.

Remote Work Accelerates the Materialization of SASE

Which providers will be the ones to respond best to the future of remote work - the one where the idea of
remote network access is fast, secure, and scalable? Surely not those who still offer singular firewall
services, or those with a basic VPN solution. None of these solutions alone is enough to defend the
network. Funnily enough, the blueprint for a single security product that might do so was created only
months before the conditions that would necessitate it.

This security ‘blueprint’ is at the heart of a new industry space race. In fact, the idea is so young that it is
prevalent largely among providers rather than the consumers of security, such as in-house IT
professionals. Called SASE, or Secure Access Service Edge, Gartner coined this term to describe a
unified network security product deployed over the cloud (SaaS), which would change how organizations
consume security and refocus it around users.

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42