As technology infrastructure becomes increasingly complex and distributed, detecting and responding to threats has become harder and harder, and has led to security sprawl. From a management point of view, this is a nightmare, as visibility is lost, limiting the ability of organisations to respond to threats rapidly and effectively.
Managing cybersecurity complexity
Integration is key
Consolidated cybersecurity
Managing visibility and costs
Protecting against future threats
The issue is compounded by the fact that organisations have far too many security tools, such as firewalls, security information and event management (SIEM), data loss prevention (DLP), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and many more, leading to increased complexity, integration costs, and human resources. Sometimes, security teams do not know what solutions are being used in different departments, and how they have been implemented, leaving them to deal with a jumble of solutions, ineffectively patched together. Again, this concurrence of factors, and the resulting siloes, and visibility gaps, gives attackers an ideal environment to exploit.
The bottom line is that one, or fewer vendors, can offer more effective security across a range of product categories, leading to reduced costs, greater efficiencies, and eliminating the need to deal with the complexity of dealing with a slew of vendors and tools that don’t work well together.
For any security strategy to be effective, integration between its multiple components is crucial, if they hope to achieve the ‘single-pane-of-glass’ visibility that is key to security in today’s modern enterprises. To do this, businesses need to choose solutions that integrate well together, which is a key component of robust, shared threat intelligence.
There are other compelling reasons for consolidating cybersecurity. Fewer vendors mean saving when it comes to maintenance costs, as well as costs (in both time and money) associated with training security teams on yet another security tool. There are hidden costs too, such as the time lost trying to adapt to new technologies, so all in all, consolidation enables companies to manage their budgets better and enhance efficiencies all around.
Consolidating security solutions also translates into better threat prevention. When each element or tool works seamlessly with the others, there are far fewer holes in the security net for bad actors to exploit. Similarly, when solutions are consolidated, the enterprise can handle security events more effectively, as they have the visibility to do so, and better threat intelligence, which means far more accurate threat detection.
All these benefits lead to more effective fighting of common scourges such as phishing and ransomware. The better a company understands its adversaries and their tools, the better equipped it is to fight them. Consolidated security helps admins to pinpoint and weed out phishing emails and suchlike more effectively, and for more complex threats that use a range of vectors and platforms, the ability to look at the bigger picture helps security teams prevent a broad spectrum of attacks against multiple vectors.
Another area where consolidation really matters is when it comes to automation. Better integration means fewer elements need to be taken into consideration. If you look at application programming interfaces or APIs, for example, when there are multiple vendors with multiple solutions, trying to program such a wide range of interactions, or looking for a solution that will work with all of them, becomes an impossibility. With three or fewer vendors, it’s far easier to find a solution that will work for the full range of what the enterprise needs to run.
At the end of the day, the concept of consolidation is all about visibility and costs. In choosing multiple solutions, and simply buying the latest solution on the market, they spend more money but are not necessarily more secure, in fact, sometimes the opposite. When it comes to security, less can be more, provided less is made up of the right solutions, and ones that offer high-security performance outcomes.
Check Point understands that the more assets there are to secure, the more complexity grows, and the more visibility is obscured. This is why the company offers a range of solutions, including Check Point Infinity - a cyber security architecture that protects against next-generation cyber-attacks and future threats across all networks; Horizon SOC - a cloud-based platform that enables SOC teams to expose, investigate and shut down attack faster; CloudGuard - which offers advanced threat prevention security to protect assets and data in the Google cloud; and Harmony - a unified security solution for users devices and access. These tools offer a consolidated security architecture, or multi-layered approach to cyber security that protects every single attack surface, from networks, cloud, endpoints, and mobile and IoT devices, all of which share the same threat prevention technologies, management services, and threat intelligence.
This consolidated security architecture was designed to solve the complexities associated with distributed workforces, increasing connectivity and security sprawl, offering total threat prevention which closes every security gap, facilitates automatic, immediate threat intelligence sharing across all security environments, and offers a unified security management platform for an effective security operation.
Ultimately, a consolidated security architecture by Check Point improves the overall security of any organisation.
We can help you through the process of consolidating your cybersecurity for better efficiency and effectiveness, simply contact us today.
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