Rajat Mohanty, CEO and co-founder of Paladion Networks, says traditional network security investments are not rising. Most organizations have set up perimeter security with a variety of products ranging from UTM, next generation firewall, intrusion prevention systems and network access controls.
Main concerns for CIOs are the move to cloud as well as higher mobility of the workforce. These are creating new risks that traditional network security solutions cannot mitigate. Ensuring protection of a variety of cloud infrastructure needs a cloud focused security strategy.
While security requirements such as access control, configuration management, monitoring for attacks and encryption of data in motion is common for traditional perimeter and cloud infrastructure their implementation is differs. The greater mobility of devices and users have also created a need for more granular controls at the network layer, going beyond just IP addresses to a user-centric security control model. The future of network security investments will be towards controlling these new risks arising from cloud and mobility.
Tips to enhance returns
Rajat Mohanty says there are several tips to CIOs to enhance returns from network security related investments. To enhance returns from network security investment, CIOs need to acquire them as services rather than a product-plus-implementation model. The network for modern organizations is very fluid with a large number of entities that may not be permanently connected to the network. In this scenario, consuming network security as a service that can be enforced everywhere to every user and every device increases the flexibility. It also reduces cost in overheads such as continuous visibility and policy management across the network.
There are recent cases relating to network vulnerability in India. In January and February of this year, we’ve noticed a wave of Ransomware related attacks in several organizations in India. These types of attacks breach gateway security and IPS systems by creating tunnels to deliver their payload to the end machine and then use network shares to propagate internally. Enterprises can do several things to remove vulnerabilities in their environment so they are not susceptible to such attacks.
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Security concerns in BYOD
The top security concern for BYOD is the risk of data loss. With decentralization of data storage, lots of confidential data is in an unstructured format in BYOD devices. While an attacker may not be able to carry out an attack stealing data in bulk, they can still get hold of sensitive data that can damage company reputation or its intellectual property. The second major risk of BYOD is the scope for attack propagation. Most of the advanced targeted attacks are multi-staged. BYOD devices provide an easy target as part of the initial stage of the attack. The attacks then proliferate and go much deeper into the network to reach larger data stores or critical transaction applications.
By Rajat Mohanty, CEO and co-founder of Paladion Networks
