Throughout my three-plus decades deeply entrenched in the security profession, I’ve encountered myriad obstacles, enigmas and, at times, downright pandemonium. In fact, you could say, without risk of hyperbole, that my tenure has been dominated by three C’s: Chaos, Complexity and assorted other Conundrums. And in that respect, I have not been alone.
Even when I happened upon isolated security solutions that could address a portion of the many challenges poised against me, their diverse implementations left me with a complexity that was formidable and, which ultimately, contained gaps that left me with integration challenges. Those gaps were spaces through which my adversaries knew that they could attack, at least until such time when I could successfully integrate them under a common protective umbrella.
In order to combat the katzenjammer that these challenges thrust upon us, I responded with three “C’s” of my own: spearheading an organization that was “Converged, Cored and Connected.” Cyber and physical security operations nestled under one organizational umbrella highlight the converged tenet. By cored, I’m referring to a structure reduced in size down to what I call its minimally essential core. Finally, being connected meant my taking deliberate engineering steps to link heretofore disparate solutions that could communicate with each other – share rich data stores – on a single platform from which to command a superior view of the cybersecurity battlespace.
The result consumed no small amount of time, energy and financial resources. The end structure left me with a sense of what I imagined it must be like to bring a child into this world. It brought with it a sense of loyalty, affection and commitment to its preservation, which accounts in part for the inertia that then seemed to hold me prisoner when it came to acknowledging or accepting that anything could be better. That I received accolades from the security industry for the “elegance” of what I had put into place also contributed to my unconscious mental reticence.
What took my team and me years to understand and eventually piece together is now in the offering through what is being presented to the community in the form of Unified Endpoint Security (UES) solutions. However, as we have seen before in the marketplace, a competitive “fog of battle” can quickly engulf a new approach or solution, making a selection, between the numerous entities now claiming to provide UES, a conundrum.
Guidance is available. Leveraging my three “C’s” can provide a roadmap to the most comprehensive UES. In the thick of battle, cyber threat prevention and remediation should not be dependent on the manual efforts of soldiers on the frontline. The best UES solution is one that buttresses its capabilities by simplifying administration, increasing visibility and control, reducing costs and eliminating unnecessary friction all while providing a higher value of security, productivity and user experience.
Enter artificial intelligence supported machine learning and automation. With their power and ability, our community can better understand and define risks, make contextual decisions stemming from large swaths of data and dynamically apply a set of policy controls that address the enemy’s incoming barrage, while keeping our evermore mobile environment fortified and secure.
And behind every good army, inside an ever-expanding battle space, is a strategic plan of defense and counterattack. In the case of a reputable UES, this includes support across a broad spectrum of solutions, including a hybrid endpoint protection platform, endpoint protection and response, mobile threat defense and expertise, continuous authentication, data loss prevention and a secure web gateway.
That a version of that UES, bolstered by the strength of AI’s machine learning, is available as a managed service makes it an all-the-more welcomed arrival. Good-bye chaos, complexity and conundrums — say hello to a calmer, more ordered, seamless security world.
