Author: Dickson Woo, Country Manager of Fortinet Malaysia
As networks become more complex and distributed, seeing and responding to cybersecurity issues has become increasingly difficult. This has led to security sprawl that complicates management, fragments visibility, and limits the ability of organisations to respond effectively to threats. This security sprawl is making any sort of centralised management challenging as many enterprises today are deploying an average of 45 security solutions across their network. In addition, detecting and responding to a cyber incident requires coordination across several tools, leading to complex workarounds that need constant management and reconfiguration every time a device is upgraded.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses had to implement a work-from-anywhere (WFA) strategy, which rapidly expanded their network's attack surface. As Malaysia's workforce gradually returns to the office, a hybrid work arrangement has become the status quo. Despite Malaysia’s cybercrime index dropping slightly between 2019 and 2021, fraud and intrusion remain major threats. In addition, 2021 registered the highest number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the country within the last three years. According to the Malaysia Computer Emergency Response Team, fraud and intrusion made up nearly 85 percent of incidents in 2021, up around a percent from 2020, while DDoS rose from 16 percent in 2020 to 22 percent last year.
As most organisations tend to move first and ask how to best secure and manage changes to their networks later, attackers have been exploiting silos, complexities and visibility gaps that naturally arise from such complex and distributed environments. So, it should come as no surprise that Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA) by Gartner®, defined as an integrated set of security tools and APIs combined with centralised management, analytics, and threat intelligence—made it onto their list of top cybersecurity trends for 2022. Gartner predicts that by 2024, organisations that adopt a CSMA strategy to integrate security tools to work as a collaborative ecosystem will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90 percent.
Understanding Cybersecurity Mesh Platform
A WFA approach to security requires solutions that can follow and protect users, data and applications from end to end. Organisations need to ensure that endpoint security solutions can work seamlessly with access controls on the network and in the cloud. WFA requires multiple technologies and applications to work together across a dynamic set of campus and data centre assets, distributed home offices and cloud-based applications. To safely and efficiently deploy new technologies and services, businesses need a broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity mesh platform that provides centralised management and visibility, supports and interoperates across a vast ecosystem of solutions, and automatically adapts to dynamic changes in the network.
While Gartner calls this idea a “Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture,” for more than a decade, Fortinet has called it the “Fortinet Security Fabric.” The company spearheaded the doctrine that a broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity mesh platform is essential to reducing complexity and increasing overall security effectiveness across today’s expanding networks.
Benefits of using a Cybersecurity Mesh Platform
An integrated security fabric is ideally suited to address the new and complex challenges of Malaysia's expanding digital ecosystem. By having a wider portfolio of interconnected security and networking technologies, organisations can share threat intelligence, correlate data and automatically respond to threats as a single, coordinated system.
To consolidate independent security solutions, organisations need to set a roadmap and identify a cybersecurity mesh platform that can integrate as many solutions as possible using a unified set of zero trust, endpoint, connectivity, cloud, and network security solutions.
A true cybersecurity mesh platform should further breakdown technology and vendor silos by enabling and supporting a broad open ecosystem of technology partners. Fortinet integrates and interoperates with over 450 third-party technology partners with the help of Fortinet Security Fabric open ecosystem.
With such an open ecosystem, organisations are empowered to be more flexible across their deployments while benefitting from consolidated and converged operations, visibility and security. It also preserves existing investments in technologies and solutions until they are ready to move towards an even more integrated and automated Security Fabric experience.
The trend towards a more unified approach to security is inevitable, whether to secure emerging network security challenges like WFA, to combat the rising threat of ransomware, or reducing the overhead of managing a sprawling set of isolated security solutions.
What to Expect From a High-Performing Cybersecurity Mesh Platform
Fortinet’s customers do not have to wait until 2024 for the industry to deliver a new cybersecurity mesh architecture. With the Fortinet Security Fabric, they can reap those benefits today, which include:
- Deep visibility across all edges
- Centrally managing distributed solutions
- Consistent enforcement of policies
- Leveraging anonymised threat intelligence provided by Fortinet Security Fabric customers around the world
- Third-party integrations for improved protection against known and unknown attacks
- Automating actionable responses across hybrid environments.
Security must be as agile as today's workforce, ensuring consistent protection and optimal user experience regardless of where a user or device operates. Disparate technologies with separate management and configuration will always lead to security gaps. Simply bolting consoles together with workarounds can create blind spots that cybercriminals will exploit. Competing securely in today's digital marketplace requires an integrated cybersecurity mesh platform, where every element works together and deeply integrates into the network to ensure that every change and adaptation is automatically recognised and protected.
