Seven Major Security Challenges That Can Impede Digital Acceleration

There are seven critical issues that any organisation looking to successfully adopt secure digital acceleration strategies must address.

Category: Insights

31st October 2023

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Seven Major Security Challenges That Can Impede Digital Acceleration

This acceleration of network rollout and interconnection has stretched legacy security to the breaking point. Most traditional security systems were designed to analyse and secure data at fixed points in the network, and most network products were not designed with security in mind. There are seven critical issues that any organisation looking to successfully adopt secure digital acceleration strategies must address:

1. Increased attack surface: Hybrid networks and a diverse workforce mean that today’s networks have more locations, applications, and services to protect. The effort to continually deploy new security technologies to protect the expanding network has overwhelmed many IT teams already struggling to cope with the ongoing cybersecurity skills gap.
2. Diverse and sophisticated attacks: Today’s threats not only employ increasingly sophisticated attack strategies to exploit vulnerabilities and evade detection, but they also target multiple points across the network, looking for the weakest link in the security chain. IoT/IIoT-based attacks are emerging, designed to target OT Industry 4.0 and such things as AI for robotics control, near-real-time digital twins, and production line automation.
3. Inconsistent security: Users, devices, and applications can be anywhere. Not all security solutions can say the same. And when security solutions and platforms cannot be universally deployed or centrally managed and orchestrated, it can be impossible to deliver consistent and location-agnostic security across the hybrid network.
4. Encrypted traffic: The ever-increasing volume of encrypted traffic means that IT teams are trying to combat today’s threats while blindfolded. Most security solutions cannot inspect high volumes of encrypted traffic to find malware or exfiltrated data without seriously impacting network performance and user experience.
5. Complexity: Multi-vector attacks exploit the inability of security solutions to share and correlate threat data. With few exceptions, multivendor networking and security systems cannot talk to each other, which means IT teams must rely on hand-correlating threat intelligence with network information to detect and respond to threats. And trying to stay ahead of an ever-evolving threat landscape using multiple management consoles not only increases operational costs but also makes it difficult to troubleshoot issues, identify exploitable configuration gaps, or initiate a timely response to identified threats.
6. Lack of integration and coordination: Disparate security systems that do not share information can make it impossible to make effective decisions. In most networks, on-premises applications and physical infrastructures struggle to coordinate and communicate with cloud applications and networks. As a result, if one gets attacked, there is no integrated mechanism to even notify the other, let alone initiate appropriate protections.
7. Work from anywhere: Today’s workforce needs seamless access to private applications in a data centre or multi-cloud environment, yet they are not reliably within the four walls of the office or an IT-supported branch location. Organisations must find ways to ensure consistent access to business resources everywhere for employees working from anywhere—while continuing to leverage existing investments.

Digital Acceleration Requires Integrated Security

Protecting today’s networks requires an integrated approach to security. That starts by developing and deploying a security fabric that can scale in lockstep with the network to provide consistent protection and policy enforcement everywhere. This requires two things. The first is the ability to converge networking and security into a single solution so protections can seamlessly adapt to changes in the underlying network. And the second is a security platform that includes a full suite of security tools designed to work together as a single system, along with open standards and APIs so it can also interoperate with third-party solutions. It also needs to be deployed anywhere, in any form factor—from home offices to large campuses and hybrid data centres to distributed branches and across every public cloud. This enables true end-to-end automation for the rapid detection and coordination of response to threats, centralised management and orchestration to eliminate troubleshooting and configuration errors, and hyperscalability so security can quickly and easily adapt to ongoing digital acceleration efforts.