ALAIN SANCHEZ,
EMEA CISO,
SENIOR
EVANGELIST AT
FORTINET
?
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
The gap is
broadening between
the sophistication
of the threat and
the cybersecurity
headcount.
editor’s question
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.
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