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As we kick off the new year, I’ve taken a moment to take stock of our blog posts from the past year. There was certainly no shortage of talking points in cybersecurity last year, and we touched on a wide array of subjects that caught the industry’s attention – from cyber-attacks and incident response to firewall management and security in the cloud.
So, as we move into 2018, here’s a round-up of our 10 most popular blogs from 2017.
In July, Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls for 2017. Despite the many predictions in recent years of the death of the physical firewall, it will continue to be the cornerstone of network security, and there’s clearly growing interest in virtual firewalls as data center virtualization continues and both SDN and IaaS projects gain traction in enterprise organizations.
We were especially pleased to see that Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) solutions were given more exposure in 2017’s Magic Quadrant than in previous years. The report recognized that, “Although the NSPM market is still somewhat small, it’s growing fast, and the customers requiring help with complexity are the very largest[2]”, and “Network security policy management (NSPM) products are increasingly used to manage complexity, especially in multivendor situations.[1]”. Moreover, “All NSPM vendors support multiple firewall products (including, in some cases, cloud-resident firewalls), whereas no firewall vendor will effectively manage a competing product. [3]” and look forward to more in-depth analysis this year.
Since the beginning of cloud, the prevailing expectation was that organizations would follow a standardized, linear ‘cloud adoption’ roadmap, and on-premise infrastructures would eventually become redundant. Yet despite the increase in the number of applications being migrated to the public cloud, spending on on-premise infrastructure continues to rise and many companies are actually repatriating applications back to their on-prem data centers. We looked at the reasons why this is happening and why IT teams will need to continue maintaining security across both on-premise and cloud environments.
I spoke with the former CISO of a large enterprise to get his insights into the security, compliance and operational challenges he faced on a day-to-day basis.
Our fourth most read article last year looks at what may have been in store for cybersecurity in 2017. I sat down with Avishai Wool, AlgoSec’s CTO and Edy Almer our VP of Products to get their predictions… which of these came true?
As IT security becomes ever more business critical, most organizations have accumulated large numbers of complex firewall rulesets across their many security devices. These rulesets are regularly changed and added to and, as a result, they become bloated, in part because security teams are worried about the repercussions of cleaning up. Deleting a rule can be nerve-wracking since it might inadvertently cause an outage, or a gap in the security perimeter.
But doing nothing is just as dangerous. Bloated rulesets add significant security risk, they add complexity and delays to policy change management processes, and they can impact the performance of your firewall appliance. This posts from Prof. Wool explained how AlgoSec’s application-centric approach to security policy management solution helps organizations drastically streamline the firewall cleanup and rule recertification process.
There’s nothing better than an objective, independent product review from a well-respected industry publication, and in May 2017 we were delighted to receive an outstanding review from Network World. In the comparative review, the reviewer John Breeden II said that “of all the products we tested, AlgoSec was the most innovative”, and asserted that of all the solutions compared, he was “most impressed with AlgoSec”. You can also see the full Network World review here.
When firewalls are in place and money is being spent on network security, the long-standing assumption is that all is well and risks are minimal. If something’s bad, the firewall will quickly detect and block it, or alerts will be sent across the organization flagging up the problem. Well, we know that’s not the case; one of the biggest issues that create a false sense of security is vulnerabilities, which may well be getting past your firewall controls without detection. This post provides 7 vulnerabilities that you cannot afford to overlook.
One of the most notorious ransomware attack of the year, WannaCry infected hundreds of thousands of Windows-based computers in 150 countries. Ransomware attacks have been around for over a decade, but the sheer scale – and impact – of WannaCry made it headline news all over the world. We put together some essential tips for organizations looking to contain and limit their exposure to the threat.
9. Tips for auditing your AWS security policies, the right way
Having blogged quite a bit about best practices for setting up and managing security in your AWS estate, it was time to talk about auditing this environment. If you store any data that’s subject HIPAA, PCI or any other industry regulation in the cloud, it must be audited to the exact same requirements as it is on your on-premise networks. Our CTO Avishai Wool helpfully put together advice, options and tips for AWS users along with a whiteboard video lesson on the subject.
10. The five stages of security policy management
IT teams are often perceived as standing in the way of innovation and business agility. When an enterprise rolls out a new application or migrates an application to the cloud it can take weeks or even months to ensure that all the network and security devices can communicate with each other, and at the same time prevent access to hackers and unauthorized users.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. This blog discusses a new lifecycle approach to managing network security. This approach provides a framework for automating repeatable processes, and enables disparate technical and business groups to collaborate effectively to improve business agility, reduce risk, and ensure compliance.
[1] Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls, by Adam Hils, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, July 10, 2017.
[2] Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls, by Adam Hils, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, July 10, 2017.
[3] Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls, by Adam Hils, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, July 10, 2017.
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