Changing Security at the Speed of Business

In today’s fast-paced, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world, changes in business must happen in the blink of an eye or have significant negative impact. Some changes are driven by business need, others by environment. For example, digital transformation in business is driven by business need. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic has and continues to force business changes that will likely continue to be part of an ongoing “New Reality” of business.

Many business changes forced by digital transformation or the coronavirus are related to security. Rapidly increasing capacity or quickly changing configurations on security solutions can be driven by the need to add new applications or adapt existing ones, or by an immediate and massive influx of remote workers or work-from-home requirements.

Did your organization fail a security audit or maybe had a security breach? Security enhancements may be necessary to pass a re-audit or to better protect the business and lower the risk of a new breach. Organizational security changes likely require upgrades to or deployment of new security solutions. It’s also probable that security solutions have been manually connected, creating a daisy-chained security stack. The changes in securing business must be made quickly and accurately, or the business can be at grave risk.

Changing or upgrading security solutions is difficult, error prone, and time-consuming. It can lead to long wait times for approvals from change control boards. Change windows can involve input from dozens of stakeholders and the need to verify functionality of critical business flows. For heavily regulated industries, such as financial services and governments, and consumer-heavy businesses, like retail and ecommerce, changes or upgrades to security stacks can be even more demanding and lengthy. Stress-filled change windows may lead to hundreds or more lost person-hours. Static security stacks are complex, lack adaptability, and can negatively impact security performance, but can also cause long delays in implementing necessary security modifications. The time to swap out, upgrade, or change security solutions can increase operational and business costs. Business and revenue can be lost. It can also lead to lost opportunity costs. Changes in security solutions may even lead to traffic—most of which today is encrypted and requires decryption before it can be inspected and deemed secure—that is unintentionally bypassed and left unchecked by security solutions, leading to more breaches and lost or compromised customer data or personally identifiable information (PII). Security changes can typically mean long delays, hours of testing, downtime, lost productivity, and increased risk.

To best protect users and customers, and especially applications and data, organizations today must be able to make changes to their security stack at the speed of business. But, how?

Orchestrating Infrastructure Security

Security infrastructure orchestration simplifies security solution changes and greatly reduces risks associated with making modifications as compared to traditional security delivery. Orchestrating the solutions in the security stack helps organizations shorten the typically burdensome, inefficient process of change management. Orchestration of security infrastructure simplifies equipment changes and alleviates the negative impacts of those changes. It also eliminates potential traffic bypass and exploitation.

Security stack orchestration allows the never-ending flow of network traffic to be re-routed from one active security solution to another. It’s like weaning traffic off of one solution to another active solution without interrupting traffic flow or allowing encrypted traffic to bypass security. Orchestrating the security stack enables the swap out or update of security solutions by bypassing them while not interrupting traffic flow, traffic decryption, and inspection for the rest of the security stack. Direct, select traffic can be routed to the new security solution in a specific, customized dynamic service chain, based on the traffic’s context, to test out the new or upgraded solution while maintaining the previous solution ready to take traffic if need be.  Once the new solution is proven with live traffic, the existing solution can then also be updated.

Orchestrating security infrastructure drives shorter change management windows for security solutions, is more efficient, and proves less costly than traditional security delivery.

Security stack orchestration drives security solution changes at the speed of business, greatly reducing risk, costs, and productivity and revenue loss versus typical security change management processes.

To learn more about Orchestrating Security Infrastructure, how it saves time, cost, and human power, and drives evolving security at the speed of business, please click here.