Cybersecurity & Networking

The first blog I wrote about elastic cloud gateways prior to Black Hat 2019 referenced next-generation firewalls relative to the shift to application-centric, Layer 7 scanning, and the massive impact that had on the network security market. What I didn’t appreciate at the time is how similar the trajectory of the two spaces would be. In the 10 months since Black Hat, we’ve witnessed a massive amount of momentum in this area. In fact, recently completed ESG research on elastic cloud gateways found that 94% of organizations reported usage of, or some level of interest in, these types of solutions. With secure access services edge (SASE) having become common terminology within the network security space, I’m often asked what the difference is between ECG and SASE. The fact is, there are many more similarities than differences; however, the differences that do exist are important.

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XDR may succeed but XDR vendors face deployment challenges and competition on several fronts.

My colleague Dave Gruber and I are all over this new concept called XDR. Just what is this new acronym all about? In a recent CSO Online blog, I defined XDR as:

An integrated suite of security products spanning hybrid IT architectures, designed to interoperate and coordinate on threat prevention, detection, and response. XDR unifies control points, security telemetry, analytics, and operations into one enterprise system.

Hmm, sounds interesting but is there a market for yet another type of security product? (more…)

Back in March, I heard from several CISOs about how COVID-19 was disrupting their cybersecurity programs and changing their priorities. A few weeks later, I connected with some CISO friends, and got an update on phase 2 of their pandemic journeys.

While no one knows when the coronavirus impact will end, we are getting a good perspective on what the new normal will look like. Here are ten changes I anticipate (in no particular order):

1. Work from home (WFH) becomes the default model. This one is an obvious assumption, but one we can back up with data: According to ESG research, 79% of IT executives say that their organization will be more flexible about WFH policies after the pandemic subsides. Furthermore, WFH seems to be, well, working: 78% of knowledge workers report being either more productive working from home or having no change in productivity. Between productivity gains and real estate savings, WFH is a winner — and is driving lots of changes to security investment and priorities.
2. Any remnant of a security perimeter is now dead. When I started in security nearly 20 years ago, a group of financial services companies started an organization called the Jericho Forum, which pitched the concept of de-perimeterization. While most security professionals agreed with the idea, scaling security remained a challenge, so network perimeters remained and changed slowly over time. COVID-19 may be the final security perimeter coffin nail. To support a more distributed IT infrastructure, security controls will move wholesale to endpoints — users, devices, applications, data, etc. The good news is that cloud-based management planes will make this architecture much easier to scale and operate than in the past. What are the new perimeters? Users and devices (i.e., identities) and data.
3. Hail to the cloud. Cloud workload migration accelerated due to COVID-19 as it was easier to administer cloud infrastructure than on-premises servers, networks, and storage devices. To keep up, CISOs must ramp up cloud security hiring, training, and skills development on their teams. It’s also clear now that the public cloud is the de facto infrastructure for network security controls, consolidating SD-WAN and security services. The same is true for security analytics with data and analytics engines moving quickly to the cloud. Finally, security management planes are heading in the same cloudy direction. CISOs will need new skills for migrating data and tools and managing cloud subscriptions.
4. The mainstreaming of attack surface management (ASM). CISOs will need better ways to collect, process, and analyze data for cyber-risk management as users and assets become more distributed and remote. This should happen quickly since most organizations have no idea about all the connections to their network and regularly discover things like previously unknown devices, misconfigured servers, default passwords, partner connections, etc. ASM will evolve from an esoteric area to an enterprise requirement. Vendors like BitSight, Bugcrowd, CyCognito, Randori, and others will benefit from this transition.
5. Doubling down on policy management. With everything distributed, CISOs will need to work with business managers to determine who can do what from where and really (and I mean really) tighten up their security policies with granular and dynamic rule sets. Once policies are determined, they’ll also need the CIO’s help to build an infrastructure for policy enforcement and monitoring. There is a tremendous opportunity for security technologies here — vendors that build intuitive, flexible, and scalable policy management engines will clean up.
6. Identity management gets an overhaul. Distributed security controls and policy management must be anchored by a modern identity management infrastructure — not the organically grown patchwork we’ve kludged together over the past 20 years. To ease this migration, identity will also migrate to the cloud in a hurry. This is good news for JumpCloud, Okta, and Ping, but I believe cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, VMware, and obviously Microsoft will make a big play here as well.
7. Cyber threat intelligence at scale. COVID-19 is a global opportunity for the cyber-underworld, leading to a wave of new scams and attacks. To counteract this trend, organizations need to be able to operationalize, analyze, and hunt for threats at an unprecedented scale. This should represent a growth opportunity for threat intelligence platforms and investigation tools like Anomali, King & Union, Palo Alto Networks, RecordedFuture, ThreatConnect, and ThreatQuotient at the high end of the market. Smaller enterprises will likely dive deeper into threat intelligence services from the likes of Cisco, FireEye, IBM, and Secureworks.
8. AI and ML, the next generation. Security teams will need to make sense of more assets, more connections, more movement, and more threats — all at once. Business management’s push for a permanent WFH structure make this an absolute certainty, and there isn’t a security team on the planet that will be able to keep up with the new reality without help. We are currently driving up the AI/ML on-ramp, and we’ll need to get up to speed quickly. This is a wide open opportunity, but somehow, I think that companies like Devo, Google (Chronicle), IBM, Microsoft, SAS, and Splunk will play.
9. On to serious security training. WFH and coronavirus-related scams mean the days of security awareness training as a “checkbox” exercise are over. Moving forward, I believe security aptitude will be required for most employees with compensation incentives or penalties associated with performance. Business managers will also be accountable for employee education and penalized when their team’s ignorance leads to a security breach. On the supply side, vendors will need to supplement basic compliance training with more thorough course work designed for knowledge workers.
10. Tighter security and IT operations cooperation. Provisioning secure endpoints, cloud workloads, or network infrastructure will require security to be “baked in” rather than “bolted on.” Additionally, security policy enforcement and monitoring will need to be coordinated all over the place. In the past, security and IT operations teams had different objectives, metrics, and compensation structures. Given all the work ahead, it’s likely that organizations will measure these teams based upon common projects rather than disparate goals. This should be good news for vendors like ExtraHop, Netscout, ServiceNow, and Tanium, that have technologies and experience in both areas. Security vendors will need to improve their IT operations chops if they want to keep up.

There’s lots of changes and lots to think about. More soon from me as I’m following the impact of COVID-19 closely.

In addition to reporting very strong growth in its fiscal third quarter, Zscaler announced the completed acquisition of Edgewise Networks last week. At a price tag of $31 million, this won’t be a deal that turns many heads, but maybe it should. We’ve seen much of the industry shift to a cloud-delivered network security approach over the last 10 months, something ESG calls elastic cloud gateways (ECGs). In many ways, this is the logical evolution of the approach Zscaler introduced more than 10 years ago. However, the Edgewise Networks deal, along with the recent acquisition of cloud security posture management (CSPM) vendor Cloudneeti show that Zscaler is beginning to think beyond just user access and toward a broader approach to cloud security overall. Specifically, the addition of Edgewise Networks strengthens Zscaler’s zero-trust capabilities to address not only the workforce, but also applications and workloads.

Edgewise certainly covers the essential capabilities for microsegmentation. Recent ESG research asked respondents for the most important attributes in a microsegmentation solution. The top factor cited by 42% of respondents was the ability to identify and map the traffic and relationships between workloads, applications, and other entities. Also of high importance is support across multiple deployment models (i.e., data center, public cloud, and containers), which was cited by 39% of respondents. Edgewise has both these bases covered.

However, Edgewise provides an interesting take on these typical approaches to microsegmentation by adding a layer of identity authentication between applications or services. This, as well as some of the machine learning capabilities Edgewise brings to the table, could see interesting uses within Zscaler’s current zero-trust access solutions over time. Better visibility into user application access patterns, built-in identity validation, and the machine learning engine itself could all enhance Zscaler’s Private Access offering.

One challenge Zscaler will face is getting this in front of the right people. The ownership for microsegmentation solutions remains fractured, with IT ops, SecOps, DevOps and application development, and the network security teams all potentially having input depending on the organization. Zscaler’s C-level focus should help here, as will providing solutions supporting a more well-rounded zero-trust approach. However, building DevOps credibility will be paramount.

These recent tuck-in acquisitions have potential upside with limited risk due to the small acquisition costs. We expect to see cloud adoption continue to accelerate as organizations look for increased flexibility, agility, and cost-savings due to the impact from COVID-19. Microsegmentation capabilities to support a zero-trust approach and CSPM are two areas of security sure to benefit from the increased focus.