EDITOR’S QUESTION
ALAIN SANCHEZ, EMEA
CISO, SENIOR EVANGELIST
AT FORTINET
Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A +
tThe black swan of 100%
remote working
Even the most far-sighted of business leaders
did not see it coming. No contingency plan
that I know of had forecasted that almost
the entire workforce was grounded in just a
couple of days. Even telcos whose transport
practices earned them the terminology of
carrier-grade, were initially taken by surprise.
But very rapidly, the importance of securing
these traffics that were literally business
critical, emerged as the immediate priority.
Security could not be traded for connectivity
and the irresponsible hackers that squeezed
themselves into video conferences that
did not implement the full authentication
options, did the digital world a favour
by accelerating a security wake-up call.
Moreover, the confinement made the need
for a holistic approach of cybersecurity even
more obvious. In two weeks, secure remote
working became the most popular topic in
those corporate e-meetings that intended on
taking emergency investment steps. Fortinet,
for instance, saw its SD-WAN revenues grow
significantly; already recognised by the
Omdia report as the fastest growing vendor
among all other SD-WAN vendors, Fortinet
reported 305% year-over-year growth in the
SD-WAN area. This massive adoption of the
holistic approach of cybersecurity incarnated
by the Fortinet Security Fabric, says a lot
about the maturity leap created by the
recent crisis; business leaders are massively
adopting the idea that cybersecurity has to
be thought as a whole and not any more
as a mosaic of isolated point-solutions. The
times of disjointed and budget-consuming
‘best of breed’ are over.
Orchestration, the big brother
of automation
Now a question remains, is this huge
demand for broader, integrated and
automated cybersecurity platforms a sign
that the entire IT budget is about to grow
in the same proportion? Although it is still
a bit early to jump to conclusions, it seems
that the raise of holistic cybersecurity
platforms might happen as part of a
rationalisation trend. I see more and more
of these charts where the plethora of logos
once seen as a security insurance is now
depicted as unnecessary complexity. And
rightly so, the gap is broadening between
the sophistication of the threat and the
cybersecurity headcount.
For this reason, organisations are more
and more attracted by the promise
of automation and his big brother,
orchestration. Their reasoning is simple:
too many products lead to too many alerts
which puts a tremendous amount of stress
on the cybersecurity staff. Investments are
thus shifting towards solutions that not only
enable visibility, reporting an analytics for
all ‘on platform’ devices and endpoints, but
also enable multi-vendor incident detection
to finally lead to unified orchestration of the
response across the entire infrastructure.
Holistic does not mean monopolistic
Business leaders hate to be locked in, so they
rather invest in open, standardised solutions
that offer a wide range of documented APIs
and connectors, not only to ensure seamless
integration but also to maintain the freedom
of choice of strategic vendors such as cloud
providers and Managed Security Service
Providers. The same is happening in the
cybersecurity world – investments are going
into platforms that make openness and
standardisation a core value.
“
THE TIMES OF
DISJOINTED
AND BUDGET-
CONSUMING ‘BEST
OF BREED’ ARE
OVER.
36 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com