5 Tips to Help You Find the Right Cybersecurity System

An overarching takeaway that many cybersecurity professionals learned from the pandemic is that the “computing as you are” movement, with people working from different locations using different devices, is difficult to secure with the available cybersecurity tools. The components of enterprise networks have changed and securing assets from anywhere in the world and from any device is extremely challenging.

The network is now a hybrid collection of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, users, applications, devices, and data, and it often includes operational technology and internet of things environments. Since networks aren’t static, we need the ability to see changes across the entire network as they occur, so we can detect and respond to activities that shouldn’t be happening, but gaining comprehensive real-time visibility is difficult.

Today’s threat landscape and economic headwinds compound the challenge. Cybersecurity decision-makers are under pressure to reduce risk and require a solution that can provide immediate value and maintain that value moving forward. In other words, the search for a future-proof solution is on.

Here are five considerations when evaluating network security solutions with a look toward future-proofing. 

As the composition of your network evolves and changes, and as the use of encryption becomes pervasive, the ability of legacy on-premises architectures to keep up is limited. They require costly and complex licensing of appliances, sensors, or agents to operate. Not to mention taps, aggregators, or decryptors to inspect network traffic. Meanwhile, cloud security vendors are focused on providing visibility into cloud environments, but very rarely into on-premises and legacy environments.

For the flexibility to adapt in a dynamic environment, look for a platform that performs equally well across your entire hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-premises environments and provides consistent visibility so you can see what’s happening on your network regardless of encryption.

With traditional appliance-based models, technologies and tools that are very important to secure your networks can sit for a long time–stalled by provisioning, shipping, and deployment delays. When another part of your network needs coverage, you need to be able to deploy capabilities where and when you need them and make them productive in hours, not weeks or months.

A software-as-a-service or SaaS-based model deploys frictionlessly so you can quickly gain real-time awareness of the composition and behavior of the participants on your network. With no hardware or software to deploy, you can scale up and down in lockstep with the needs of your business to meet the future head-on.

Future proof also means being able to work with and extend the value of your security technology stack as it exists today and as it evolves. A network security platform must support an ecosystem of third-party integrations so you can bring data into the platform for compromise detection and advanced analytics and signal out when activity warrants a response.

Pre-built integrations should be available for activation as part of the platform, and creating new integrations should be a quick and easy process so that you can be ready to go in days or less.

A future-proof solution must be able to evolve and scale beyond the security team’s baseline use case of network detection and response. For example, cloud teams should be able to use it for software and data security posture management across multi-cloud environments. It can become a go-to tool for network teams to manage bandwidth and routing, resolve performance issues, and detect misconfigurations.

Compliance teams can even use it to validate against internal policies and regulatory controls such as the payment card industry data security standard (PCI-DSS).

Behind every future-proof solution is a provider that acts as a partner, not a vendor. Singularly focused on your success, they are dedicated to demonstrating a strong return on investment and adding new capabilities to continuously improve your team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Ask to speak with customer references so you can validate their track record and decide for yourself if they are a solution provider you can count on for the long haul. Go beyond a demo and ask to try it in your environment.