The explosion of network edges (data center, LAN, LTE/5G, OT, CASB, SASE, and WAN) continues to expand and divide the perimeter. And new attack vectors such as home networks, off-grid devices, and digital supply chains require organizations to engage in cyber warfare on multiple fronts simultaneously. While some of these new environments in need of protection are being added to address urgent business requirements, others enjoy a level of trust they don't deserve and therefore go unnoticed.

In all cases, given the rate of innovation, there is seldom enough time to make them part of a coherent or comprehensive security strategy. In fact, nearly 80% of organizations are introducing innovations faster than they can protect against cyber attacks.

And when security is rolled out piecemeal to try to keep up, the resulting sprawl of vendors and solutions creates complexities that further limit visibility and restrict control. This creates much more than a logistical or management challenge.

Cybercriminals spend time and energy finding new ways to bypass security controls, infiltrate networks, and achieve their goals. To do this, their attacks are becoming more sophisticated. New attacks simultaneously target different network edges to hide their attack methods and identify the most easily exploited link in the security chain. Some are even leveraging cloud computing resources to deliver polymorphic attack sequences at rapid scale and with full automation. Few distributed networks that rely on traditionally isolated point products can see, let alone counter, these kinds of threats.

Traditional security solutions and strategies don't work

The clear challenge is that the disconnected and siled security tools put in place to secure rapidly expanding and multiplying network edges do not work together. This disconnect creates security and performance gaps that make it impossible to see and respond effectively to sophisticated, distributed attack sequences. Even if a security team stumbles upon an attack in progress and can marshal enough resources to fight it, there is no way to preserve that intelligence to defend against the next attack.

The reason this is happening is because much of the digital innovation that is being implemented is being done piecemeal, which means there is no unified security strategy or framework to keep things together. Instead, most organizations have amassed a wide variety of isolated security tools designed to monitor a specific function or protect a network segment in isolation. This leaves security teams burdened with the responsibility of manually correlating, identifying, and responding to the entire attack sequence. But relying on humans to seek out and respond to attacks that can often be measured in microseconds is a recipe for disaster. It's part of the reason why, during the last six months of 2020, there was a sevenfold increase in ransomware attacks.

Las soluciones y la expansión de la implementación híbrida en hardware, software y modelos “X-as-a-Service” han hecho que mantener una amplia visibilidad de la red y una aplicación de políticas consistente sea casi imposible, y mucho menos mantener y monitorear las diversas soluciones de seguridad y redes implementadas. Esto se ha vuelto aún menos efectivo a medida que los ciberdelincuentes desarrollan estrategias de ataque más sofisticadas diseñadas para explotar estas limitaciones, junto con nuevas e innovadoras estrategias de ciberdelito como servicio que aumentan la efectividad y el volumen de los ataques.