Unlike legacy models that use a patchwork of solutions to secure applications and data, SASE integrates network and security services. This reduces complexity, saves on infrastructure costs, and simplifies management.
The best SASE solutions offer a balanced set of network and security functions unified on one platform and delivered as a world-class service. NordLayer’s Managed SASE solution includes the following critical security components:
Zero Trust Network Access
When it comes to deploying SASE, several factors can impact success. Networking and security functions must collaborate to ensure proper implementation. In addition, many tools do not offer standardized pricing, so it is best to evaluate the needs of individual organizations before making a purchasing decision.
Legacy security models often lead to fragmented infrastructures, duplicated functionalities, and spiraling costs. SASE solutions for worldwide cybersecurity offer a compelling alternative. By centralizing network and security functions into a single platform, SASE eliminates the need for siloed hardware, software, and maintenance expenses. This unified approach reduces costs and simplifies management through a consolidated dashboard, increasing operational efficiency and agility. In today’s dynamic business environment, SASE empowers organizations to improve their security posture while optimizing costs and streamlining operations.
A centralized dashboard provides easy troubleshooting for both network and security issues. Additionally, consolidated tools enable IT teams to reduce their time juggling multiple applications and systems, freeing them to focus on business-critical priorities.
SASE uses a ‘never trust, always verify’ approach to access control based on identity rather than the device or location. This eliminates the traditional security perimeter and requires more agile, flexible, and dynamic access policies. Using an identity-based approach is the most effective way to implement SASE. NordLayer’s SASE solution includes a secure web gateway (SWG), CASB, and ZTNA to safeguard remote workers’ access to private apps and cloud and SaaS services. It also includes device posture monitoring to track the health of remote devices in real-time.
Multi-Factor Authentication
Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, requires more than one factor to verify a user’s identity before granting access to an account. This security measure prevents hackers from stealing a user’s login credentials and exploiting them to access sensitive data. It also lessens the chance of ransomware and phishing scams. MFA is now commonplace for many online services and is even required by some governments and banks.
MFA solutions can verify a user’s identity through multiple methods, including passwords, mobile phone verification, security tokens, biometrics (fingerprint readers, retinal scanners), and behavioral analytics. This helps protect the company and its users from hacks, malware, phishing, and other threats that can threaten productivity, data safety, and compliance.
Adaptive MFA offers more sophisticated security by evaluating the risk presented by a particular user when requesting access to tools or information, using data like time and location for context. This security measure is an integral part of a holistic security strategy for any business. It is especially critical as more employees work outside the office and businesses rely more on remote working technologies. It also helps meet regulatory compliance requirements, such as GDPR. The right MFA solution for your business will depend on your specific threat model and technical capability. However, we recommend starting with a TOTP-based MFA option that is fast and non-disruptive for your end users.
Advanced Threat Detection
In the past, security tools relied on the cyber fingerprint of a threat to find and stop it. However, this static approach no longer works as attackers evolve tactics and tools to evade detection by traditional firewalls, antivirus programs, and endpoint security solutions.
Advanced threats, also known as advanced persistent threats (APTs), are long-term attacks launched by highly equipped actors with nearly inexhaustible resources that evade signature-based security. These attacks attack multiple entry points, forge new pathways, and linger in your system to steal data or cause damage.
Today, ATP solutions use dynamic protection methods, including sandboxing, user and entity behavior analytics, and automated monitoring to detect these threats and provide alerts for quick remediation. They monitor your network to see unusual activity and help prioritize risk so that your team can act quickly to prevent and mitigate a threat before it escalates into a breach.
To protect you against the latest threats, ATP solutions integrate with third-party intelligence from the web and dark web to understand attack patterns and provide real-time infrastructure monitoring. This helps avert security alert fatigue and offers context to ensure your teams respond to the right threats at the right time.
Network Intelligence
The technologies of deep packet inspection (DPI), packet capture, and business intelligence (BI) are built upon network intelligence (NI). NI examines data packets continuously, in real-time, and correlates those packets for better network visibility and analysis of data relationships and communications patterns.
This technology helps identify and address security threats– traffic congestion, network performance degradation, or malicious activity. It also helps to improve service delivery, customer experience, and revenue optimization.
As the world’s workforce continues to shift toward remote work – encouraged by companies in the wake of pandemic concerns – cybercriminals look for vulnerable or misconfigured systems that connect to the internet, a task made much easier when employees are preoccupied or distracted at home. As a result, security teams are overwhelmed by the volume of security alerts they receive.
This problem can be mitigated by artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can automate many security-related jobs and even completely take over some of them. This frees up cybersecurity resources to focus on more challenging threats and prevent them from getting out of hand. However, it’s important to remember that AI isn’t a panacea for cybersecurity challenges. Cybercriminals can use machine learning and automation to their advantage just as easily as legitimate companies. A comprehensive and agile cybersecurity solution requires more than just combining these technologies.
