We kicked off 2014 with the high-profile Target breach and subsequently saw a string of major data breaches affecting almost every major business sector as the year progressed. Unfortunately, these incidents are not going away any time soon, as hackers become more sophisticated in their approaches and cleverer at penetrating networks. And while there are vendors out there who would have you believe that there is one solution that is the end-all, be-all to addressing these hacks, there is, unfortunately, no silver bullet yet, and likely no one single solution that is going to stave off attackers.
Even though there is no panacea just yet, there are approaches that can help companies better protect against these attacks. I think the approach that has been advocated (though not yet fully implemented) by the Federal government is a huge step in the right direction. The approach emphasizes integrating your existing security systems so they share information and automate responses once a hacker has been detected.
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According to the 2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Access Control, “The market is evolving to address another use case, where network access control (NAC) policy servers act as ‘warehouses of context’ and share contextual data with firewalls and other security components to enable fine-grained policy enforcement.”[1]
As security breaches become more sophisticated and hackers become more persistent, the need to create synergistic integrations between disparate security solutions becomes increasingly more important. Here at ForeScout, we’ve built our CounterACT™ platform to seamlessly integrate (via our ControlFabric™ architecture) with a wide range of solutions from leading vendors focusing on everything from Mobile Device Management (MDM) to vulnerability assessment, and everything in between. These integrations are created to help enterprises close security gaps and strengthen their security postures by taking advantage of shared real-time threat intelligence and the ability to auto remediate any potential threats that are discovered.
We have built about 60 integrations so far, and we are still hard at work building more. We’ve also opened up our ControlFabric architecture to allow customers and third parties to design their own integrations. Each new integration brings enterprise IT security managers one step closer to complete, holistic protection. In this case, “it takes a village” to prevent cyberthreats and malware attacks.
To learn more about the range of integrations that ForeScout’s ControlFabric architecture can enable, visit: http://www.forescout.com/product/controlfabric-architecture/.
[1] Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Network Access Control, Lawrence Orans, Claudio Neiva, 10 December 2014 .
By Jack Marsal, Director of Solution Marketing, ForeScout Technologies
Bio: Jack Marsal is responsible for ForeScout’s worldwide product marketing strategy. He has 20 years of experience with IT security and enterprise infrastructure products and services. Prior to joining ForeScout, Jack was director of solution marketing for McAfee where he led the company’s effort to develop new security suites tailored for mid-size businesses. Previously, Jack held senior marketing positions at Trend Micro, Lotus Development, and CenterBeam. Jack lives in Silicon Valley and is an avid photographer and musician.
