As businesses shift to cloud apps, distributed sites and remote users, they seek ways to deliver a fast, secure SD-WAN. But this can present new challenges for network security as hackers exploit new network capabilities and vulnerabilities.
Your WAN must be securely integrated with your security solutions to protect your business from these risks. This means putting networking and security appliances closest to your cloud apps to improve user experiences while decreasing the number of trips to the data center that drag down your speeds.
Microsegmentation
The ability to granularly enforce policies across your data center, regardless of network or infrastructure type, is integral to securing SD-WAN like those provided by Versa Networks. Microsegmentation is the solution that offers this scalability.
Security administrators depend on microsegmentation to adapt their security infrastructure to emerging scenarios as they unfold. New security challenges are always presenting themselves, and the threat topology in the data center is constantly changing.
To get the most out of microsegmentation, you need a deep understanding of your infrastructure and how data flows through it. This information is necessary for adequate security controls you deploy and may even result in failures.
By identifying and mapping communications between applications, you can reveal risk. Some microsegmentation services also provide automation that identifies all communicating software, recommends zero-trust policies, and lets you apply them with one click.
These policies travel with communicating applications, so potential threats are contained to affected assets instead of spreading through the entire network. This powerful feature allows businesses to reduce the risk of data breaches and mitigate regulatory compliance mandates.
Lastly, micro-segmentation enables organizations to separate development and test environments from production systems more effectively. This prevents development staff from casually accessing sensitive data or lateral movement of malware infections acquired in the development phase.
Security teams can quickly develop and share configuration templates that govern who has access to which data and applications in different settings. This saves significant time and effort.
Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence is a collection of data that can be used to identify and address security risks. It’s vital to an effective threat management strategy and can help secure your business against cyber attacks.
Threat Intelligence is a process that includes planning, data collection, analysis, and dissemination. Ensuring that the intelligence is accurate and relevant to your organization’s security needs is critical.
Strategic: The information threat intelligence provides non-technical and can include high-level details about an attack. This information can be shared with stakeholders, such as executives and key decision-makers, to help them understand how the threat fits into the larger context of their organization’s risk and how it could impact their business.
Tactical: Technical threat intelligence focuses on indicators of compromise and helps security teams detect potential threats. It identifies command-and-control IP addresses, known malicious domain names, unusual traffic, red log-in flags and more.
The right threat intelligence can help you block most threats, freeing human researchers to focus on the few that are most dangerous. It also enables you to surface connections between attackers and their previously unknown techniques in your environment.
A centralized threat intelligence library can help you improve decision-making during investigations, predict and prevent future attacks, and get a global view of your threat landscape. With a central library, you can integrate threat intelligence into your security tools and automate your threat management processes at scale.
Encryption
Encryption protects sensitive information from unauthorized viewing, theft or alteration. It is essential for transactions across insecure communication channels, such as the Internet, that can lead to data breaches.
Most SD-WANs offer several built-in security features and capabilities to protect the enterprise network from threats. These include encrypted tunnels for information in transit, firewalls and stateful gateways, and essential threat detection and response.
Another essential feature of secure SD-WAN is segmentation, which separates traffic based on application characteristics and network policies. This prevents a single attack vector from compromising all application traffic, lowering the risk of a business-impacting incident.
In addition, the natural SD-WAN security features such as identity management, network segmentation and threat intelligence ensure that only authorized users can access specific systems, applications and data. These controls help enforce security, governance and compliance policies throughout the WAN while protecting the integrity of corporate data.
Moreover, security should be built into the SD-WAN architecture, not an add-on that must be deployed separately at branch locations and the cloud. This is where a secure access service edge (SASE) platform comes into play.
Automation
Automation can be defined as technology that relegates tasks that people perform to software or hardware. It can reduce or eliminate manual steps and help businesses deliver a better customer experience and lower team stress.
It also allows networks to scale without impacting business operations or causing a loss of productivity. Automation reduces errors, improves processes, and saves time and money.
In the case of secure SD-WAN, it also simplifies network management and reduces security risk by centralized policy synchronization. Moreover, it ensures resilience by routing traffic over multiple links.
This way, the WAN can withstand disasters such as power outages or natural catastrophes while providing service levels that customers are willing to pay for.
Moreover, AI and automation can make quality service configuration decisions consistent with customer objectives and evolving. This could allow SD-WAN to prioritize VoIP traffic to deliver a seamless experience across locations, even when backbone issues arise.
Automation is essential in delivering secure SD-WAN, as it can improve user experiences, simplify network management and reduce security risk by distributing security policies to many devices throughout the WAN. It also provides consistency of application performance and user experience (UX) at remote locations and enables collaboration opportunities that can be synced automatically throughout the network.
Also Read Interesting Articles At: Pro Tech Terms.
