Many CIOs say they’re overwhelmed with managing the complex security environment needed to combat growing security threats. Now, there’s a way to solve that.
Architectures today dramatically increase the attack surface, said Akshay Kashyapa, Technical Solutions Architect, Cisco, at a recent ITWC Webinar. To manage this, “we end up having too many tools and too much data,” he said. “So, how do we make more sense out of this, and how do we bring all of this together?”
There is a simpler way, said Kashyapa. Organizations need a simplified, central management platform to give them better visibility across their security infrastructures.
Why security is getting more complicated
It takes a holistic method to combat cyber criminals, said Kashyapa. “We’re trying to create more issues to give the hackers a hard time,” he said. “The only way you can do that is with an architecture approach.”
The IT environment is changing at an unprecedented rate, Kashyapa said. The infrastructure, applications and workstations are no longer fixed in place, but constantly moving. Trends, such as the Internet of Things, the increased use of software as a service (SaaS) and the rise in remote work, are accelerating the transformation.
It’s become necessary for organizations to implement an architecture that has layers of security that include everything from firewalls to web filtering to analytics, Kashyapa explained. This can get even more complex when there’s an array of cybersecurity products from different vendors. “You could end up having, scores of tools that are disparate, and they don’t work together,” said Kashyapa.
Manage your security all in one place
A security management platform, like Cisco’s SecureX, can integrate the data from multiple fragmented tools, simplify threat and security policy management, and automate routine tasks. “It uses APIs to bring together all of your different security layers, from any vendor, for unified visibility on a single pane of glass,” said Kashyapa. “The central dashboard can serve as a single source of truth.”
There are three key benefits to this approach, said Kashyapa:
- Visibility and simplicity: The dashboard provides key operational and threat metrics across the network, endpoints, the cloud, and all applications. Threats can be quickly investigated across all technologies.
- Efficiency: The platform can automate processes saving hours of manual work in threat hunting. “The efficiency comes from not having to go to ten different platforms and being able to respond to threats automatically,” said Kashyama.
- Strengthened security: The system uses analytics to correlate behaviours and spot patterns to prevent and resolve security threats.
A law enforcement client that implemented SecureX as part of an overall security upgrade experienced impressive results, said Geordie Henderson, Director, Strategic Architecture, OnX Canada. They found that the analysis time on each threat was cut by 90 per cent in a majority of cases. “They told us that with this new tool, they’re now actually starting to understand which are the real threats,” Henderson said. SecureX is free for Cisco customers, added Kashyama.
The central cybersecurity platform is built for scale and can manage many threats without human intervention. “This works even at 3.30 in the morning when most of your staff are asleep,” said Kashyapa.