Shattered! Security in a Fragmented World of Workloads

Enterprise IT and applications have evolved over the last decade with the adoption of virtualization, microservices, hybrid data centers, and dynamic multi-cloud environments. The value of data has increased with extensive digitization of every information and process necessary to run the business.

Maintaining a consistent and comprehensive security posture is a challenge. Security teams have to do a lot of heavy lifting to work in these challenging environments. This fragmented and incomplete picture and always playing the catchup game with the dynamic infrastructure puts a lot of pressure on the admins, resulting in misconfigurations and inconsistent security posture, paving the way for breaches.

Traditional security solutions like firewalls and antivirus are insufficient and incomplete. More firewalls and more antivirus are not going to cut it.

The fact is only 15% of the traffic flows through the perimeter firewalls and no matter how good or sophisticated the firewall is, it can only do so much. And traditional antivirus and signature-based techniques can only catch a small percentage of attacks.

There are multiple vendors who are pushing different security tools in the cloud, from server hardening, vulnerability management, visibility, microsegmentation, system integrity management, application control whitelisting, EDR etc.

The biggest challenge is that these solutions are fragmented and are artificially put together with a SIEM, which is cumbersome, requires months if not years of tuning and teams of analysts dealing with false positives.

What the security team needs is a comprehensive and integrated security platform for their endpoints and workloads.

Need 1: Understand the Comprehensive Security Picture

Security teams need a place where they can see the complete picture: a consolidated view where one can understand vulnerabilities in the context of exposure. Malware infections in the context of the threats they pose. And network traffic and application access in the context of the authorization policy. Without a comprehensive picture, security teams can neither understand the situation nor communicate it to the stakeholders.

Need 2: Enforce Business Security Needs

Once security can see the comprehensive picture, they need the ability to enforce business needs. Which applications are dealing with sensitive data and need to be isolated and protected; which users are privileged or need access to privileged data and applications to perform their business function. This needs to be done in a way such that it can scale. If every environment, cloud, operating system, software, application, and user device needs a separate control, then it does not work. The work of the security teams becomes constantly translating the ever-changing business needs into infrastructure specific technologies which are never the same.

Need 3: Simplified Incident, Investigation, and Remediation Center

Acknowledgment that you need to have the ability to detect and remediate attacks is crucial – no matter how sophisticated our protection maybe. Having a consolidated platform means that no fine tuning of the incident center for months to integrate all products. No cumbersome and time-consuming false positives because the disjoint products have no context, where one product understands vulnerability but does not understand it is shielded and quarantined, where another understand botnets and malware but does not know the business value of compromised systems.

ColorTokens Xshield provides a comprehensive security platform that is designed around these key needs of security teams. Learn more about how you can get full visibility into your entire network.