GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform: A Beacon of Light in the Fog of War

“This was classic espionage, just on a scale we’ve never seen before from a traditional adversary,” said a senior Obama administration official about the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack.

Dubbed by some a cyber Pearl Harbor, the OPM hack not only compromised the personal information of more than 22 million federal employees, but it ignited a national conversation regarding the shortcomings of current online security strategies.

Experts from both the private and public sectors are calling for a new approach to security—one that focuses on the presumption of compromise. And one that we, at Gigamon, very much agree on. We know the enemies have likely made their way inside organizations and we know what they need to do to get what they want. So we’ve combined forces with our allies (our partners, the leading security vendors) to arm our customers across every industry to not only fight back, but fight smarter.

The network is the new battleground.

Last year, we announced the industry’s first Security Delivery Platform (SDP), an innovation that makes the world’s most effective security tools even stronger—because it allows them to see more, and farther, than ever before. The SDP stands as a beacon of light in the fog of war, providing pervasive and continuous visibility into network traffic in all parts of the organization, while also offering the ability to filter and direct it to the vast array of security tools (firewalls, IDS, IPS, data loss prevention, SIEMs, and the like) needed to keep an organization safe.

Seeing your enemies and how they move changes the battle, and a multi-layered security architecture—built on a security delivery platform that can be optimized to quickly detect breaches—is the way forward in this fight.

Status Quo Not Working

For all the defenses deployed today, breaches remain on the rise. Cyber criminals are penetrating networks, setting up camp, and hunkering down for a long, lucrative layover. How and why is this happening? Because today’s security architectures are fundamentally flawed. It’s a bold and alarming statement, but true. Security professionals and industry experts alike recognize this, and while there’s no easy solution, it is clear that the status quo is not working.

At Gigamon, we have proven that increased visibility to network traffic helps improve the efficacy of existing security technologies. We’ve taken our market-leading technology and applied it to security infrastructures so that enterprises, governments, and federal agencies can improve their security posture.

It makes sense that if you have an IPS, it can be augmented with visibility. The same holds true if you have a SIEM, an IDS, etc. Visibility makes them all better. And if an SDP is not among your security purchases today, it should be. With an SDP in place, you’ll be able to eliminate blind spots by ensuring that your security tools receive the information they need for faster time to detection and response.

Visibility in a Whole New Light

For more than a year, the OPM hackers had access to the agency’s security clearance systems. They used that time to move about the network, escalate access privileges, and eventually locate and successfully extracate the OPM’s database of military and intelligence officials’ records.

What’s interesting is that their progress, although low and slow, wasn’t beyond detection. The OPM simply didn’t have the right strategy or all the right tools in place. Had they turned to Gigamon, their story may have had a very different ending.

Our technology is well established. We’ve been making visibility fabrics for a long time, but it’s the application that’s now changing. As the creator and leader in the network traffic visibility market, we stand together with our partners in this fight against cybercrime. But we also stand alone as the industry’s first solution provider in what we believe should be considered a new and emerging category of security defense: the security delivery platform.

The GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform is a unique solution, designed to solve a universal challenge and combat a ubiquitous enemy. It’s all about feeding network visibility to pure-play security technologies so they can be better at what they do: Detecting. Responding. Analysing.

Call to Arms

“There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

A Winston Churchill aphorism that stands true today. Victory on this new battleground requires allies. And that’s why, along with our industry-leading partners, Gigamon is calling on organizations large and small to rethink their cybersecurity architecture and take the fight to the attackers. Working together, we can see threats earlier, and isolate and eliminate them faster.

As a community, we know we’re on the brink of something significant. Our customers see the value in adopting Gigamon. Our partners see it too, as evidenced by them joining us in bringing this message forward.

Today we stand united, ready to turn the tables on our attackers.

Join us, at wefightsmart.com.