work-from-anywhere setup

It has been more than two years since the pandemic pushed businesses to transform digitally. However, thriving in the digital world is not an easy feat. As a result, organizations accelerate their digital initiatives to greater heights, making them more vulnerable to cyber threats.

What are the current trends businesses face in their digital acceleration efforts? And how can they secure their complex and distributed networks from cybercriminals?

In 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 catapulted employers to adopt a work-from-anywhere setup for their employees. A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group and The Network revealed that this setup is expected to continue as 89 percent of the 208,807 respondents across 190 countries prefer remote or hybrid work post-pandemic.

To support this new working environment and even cater to their consumers’ digital needs, businesses accelerated their digital transformation. For instance, 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 puts the cybersecurity skills gap as one of the main concerns of businesses in today’s world.

Meanwhile, in a report published by Gartner, 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

Due to businesses’ digital acceleration efforts, networks are becoming more complex and distributed. For that reason, detecting and responding to threats is a challenge for organizations. And while businesses can enhance their security posture and strategy with the best-of-breed security tools, it is not enough to secure them.

According to Louie Castañeda, country manager of Fortinet Philippines, “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.”

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.

In the advent of 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

According to Gartner, the cybersecurity mesh is defined as “a modern conceptual approach to a security architecture that enables the distributed enterprise to deploy and extend security where it is most needed.”

Elaborating on the mesh concept, Fortinet Philippines explained that “the CSMA is not a solution or a product to be integrated. It 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 as it provides a composable architectural approach to integrate security controls. It is distributed because it encourages and enables 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 this 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 delivers 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.

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