Paul HooperToday we witness history in the making as Gigamon announces the industry’s first Security Delivery Platform – GigaSECURE. This enables a fundamental shift in how businesses combat today’s most deleterious threats by providing security administrators with pervasive visibility of their network traffic, users, applications and suspicious activity, while simultaneously delivering it to security systems and instrumentation without impacting network availability. As a result, this improves the efficiency and performance of existing security infrastructure while reducing operational cost and complexity.
Let’s take a step back. Our world has changed significantly over the past ten years as we have seen the cyber criminal and cyber terrorist make significant inroads across environments that we used to believe to be safe and secure. The threat landscape in which we live and in which our business infrastructure operates continues to evolve and change. It is clear from the frequency and significance of the number of malicious attacks around the globe, that the balance of power is in the hands of professional cyber criminals and malicious actors. The impact of a successful attack and the associated adverse commercial and professional impact has never been greater. A quick review of many well-publicized breaches – that sometimes result in career-changing events – highlights that the traditional threat prevention architectures are falling short.
Security must change. The network perimeter is porous and in many cases, has evaporated. BYOD has enabled a more agile and empowered workforce, and in doing so driven changes regarding how IT approaches management and control of their environment. These changes, and a number of others, have changed the attack-surface (possible points of penetration) and provided significant scope for cyber criminals to gain access into the enterprise. Security today is less about preventing a breach; the strategic emphasis is now geared toward better detection, tighter containment and faster remediation.
This brings us to the crux of the issue – you can’t secure what you can’t see. Visibility to all network traffic, as opposed to sampled traffic, is the key to detecting anomalies and variances in ‘the norm’, especially for internal traffic – the LAN – which is often overlooked and assumed to be “trusted.” However, as we move from physical to virtual networking, many blind spots arise in the network and in virtual settings where east-west traffic remains hidden from security appliances and other monitoring systems. Further compounding this challenge, encrypted traffic is quickly becoming the new favorite for malware to stealthily enter the enterprise. Pervasive visibility is a prerequisite to establish strong security. Without it, we are blind to attacks.
Gigamon is the leader of the network traffic visibility market. For more than 10 years, Gigamon has been developing innovative and high-performance visibility solutions for the enterprise, data center and service provider; the breadth and depth of our portfolio is unmatched. But what sets us apart is how we go beyond just offering visibility. For example, today we unveiled Application Session Filtering – a breakthrough technology that extracts entire sessions of an identified application, allowing administrators to forward or drop “traffic of interest” to or from specific security appliances. This reduces false positives and helps optimize security appliance performance. Application Session Filtering adds to other existing intelligent features within our portfolio, including SSL decryption, de-duplication, data masking, splicing, NetFlow generation and more.
It is worth noting that no single security vendor can prevent advanced, targeted attacks and remediate a threat once breached. Strong security depends on an ecosystem of partners in order to break the ‘kill chain’ at every link. We recognize this dependency, and so too do our partners. Our efforts in creating GigaSECURE, the industry’s first Security Delivery Platform, have resulted in a myriad of accolades and endorsements from the industry’s leading security vendors, including: Check Point, Cyphort, Damballa, ExtraHop, FireEye, Fortinet, Imperva, Lancope, LastLine, LightCyber, LogRhythm, Niara, RSA, and Savvius just to name a few.
“To be effective, a security appliance needs to be able to access the right network traffic stream,” said Ed Barry, VP Cyber Security Coalition at FireEye. “The GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform addresses that challenge by providing the relevant, necessary traffic to the appropriate security device, without impacting the production network.”
Today Gigamon redefined the security market with the launch of GigaSECURE. We are championing the Security Delivery Platform, which stands to reverse the asymmetry between the network attacker, who needs to exploit only one vulnerability, while the network defender must protect all aspects of their infrastructure. Given the magnitude and multitude of threats today, it becomes evident that the time is now for something new. Now is the time for a Security Delivery Platform.
I invite you to come back to our blog, as you will learn more from Gigamon’s CTO, Shehzad Merchant, and several of our other security experts who will provide content on a variety of security topics ranging from APT’s to Zero Day Threats.
