Worldwide lockdowns have exposed our need for more agility. Whether due to another wave of COVID-19 or a similar catastrophic event, businesses must rethink their approach to better prepare and manage these types of future challenges.

In the current COVID-19 environment, organizations face both increased exposure to immediate cybersecurity risks, and deployment hurdles with new applications and tools. Subsequently, security teams are learning a valuable lesson. Specifically, the inability to go onsite for security infrastructure upgrades and changes reveals compromised manageability of security threats and reduced cybersecurity agility. Employees are working remotely from their homes on unsecured networks surrounded by foreign IoT. These working conditions greatly increase the breadth of attack in a way not previously experienced by IT teams.

As the pandemic continues, cybersecurity vulnerabilities are apparent in the lack of cyber defense agility and visibility across networks. We must understand infrastructural shortcomings from crises and develop plans to address them.

Network Architecture is on Lockdown

Prior to self-isolation requirements associated with lockdowns, many enterprises found the process of selecting and deploying new security and performance monitoring solutions slow and cumbersome. This is to say that new security and monitoring solutions tend to be deployed as hardware-based solutions. These take months to select, evaluate, deploy, and purchase.

When you add a pandemic that eliminates physical access to the equation, the issue is clear. Solutions based on proprietary hardware appliances require human beings to be physically present to deploy, maintain, and upgrade them. Unsurprisingly, these solutions are behind the curve when compared with data centers. The resulting server virtualization delivers highly efficient resource utilization, significant cost savings, and agile deployment. Additionally, data centers have and has made remote management common.

A similar method can be applied to network security and network monitoring. Moreover, you can place a common platform to host a range of virtualized commercial and open-source network analytics solutions. And yet, many organizations haven’t embraced this common platform approach. As a result, they continue to struggle with the slow and cumbersome deployments.

Without changes to support infrastructure beyond physical corporate work spaces, critical threats may slip through the net. This slip exposes the organization to malicious cyberattacks. Consequently, it makes agile response difficult and increases the alert fatigue for network security and IT teams. It’s important to ensure that these teams and their external providers are  equipped to monitor and deploy the best-in-class network security tools. This should be at the forefront of every business, as well as how to cultivate a flexible infrastructure that allows for changes without personnel onsite.

How to Improve Cyber Defense Agility for the Next Lockdown?

With the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, businesses are learning valuable ‘life lessons’ to transform operational models forever. The current hardware-based approach towards security clearly roadblocks enterprise cybersecurity agility. As such, companies should position themselves to address those approach gaps to improve network visibility, agility, and security.

Adopting a common, virtualized hardware platform removes the hardware dependency that forces organizations to be physically present for security deployment solutions. Moreover, remote software applications allow for easy deployment of security and analytics solutions. Furthermore, a virtualized hardware platform provides organizations freedom of choice for security, application performance, and network performance solutions. In fact, it can host network security solutions, as well as network and application performance tools.

Final Thoughts

Organizations must shift towards implementing a network architecture that allows for remote detection and analytics tools deployment. So, the best way to maintain both the visibility of the network and the  is to problem detection agility is to virtualize all security tools. This means encouraging security teams to deploy solutions that aren’t dependent on proprietary hardware appliances. Additionally, they should lean on open platform for software solutions deployment.

To sum it up, tools that provide shared access to a common source of data, correlating events, and integrating solutions eases streamline investigations and resolution workflows. With strategic collaboration, security, networking, IT teams can all reap the same visibility, agility, and cost-efficiency benefits.

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