How to Use Single-Pane Orchestration, Automation, and Response in Cybersecurity

An August 2018 study from Gartner found that enterprises are spending $124 billion on cybersecurity. This is expected to grow at about and 8.5% CAGR from now through 2020, and eventually reaching $270 billion. A majority of this spending is going toward purchasing multiple tools to protect enterprises against cyberthreats. Because of this strategy, according to Gartner, the average enterprise now has about 75 security tools in their arsenal.

This growing number of tools being deployed by enterprises has introduced a complexity of operations that has actually made companies more vulnerable to breaches, not less. The 2018 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report showed that the number of reported breaches has increased year over year. In 2017 alone there were about 1900 breaches, and in 2018 there were 2216 breaches—which is more than a 10% increase. Independent research gathered by Ponemon from over 2200 IT, data protection, and compliance professionals determined that while 52% of breaches can be attributed to human error and system glitches, the remaining 48% are due to malicious or criminal attack.

4 Use Cases for Single-Pane of Glass Orchestration, Automation, and Response in Cybersecurity

To address the issue of multiple tools making operations more complex, Fortinet simplifies operations by consolidating the number of point products in use and enabling single pane orchestration, automation, and response—both through network and security operations with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer in the Security Fabric.

Most organizations have many point products in place that are typically unable to share operational or cyber threat intelligence or coordinate responses across an increasingly dispersed organizational infrastructure. This critical cybersecurity shortcoming is often compounded by a lack of skilled security personnel available to manage a wide assortment of disconnected point products. 

But even large organizations with dedicated IT staff still have difficulty monitoring the network to keep track of which devices are connected, who has access to data, where data is stored, and which resources are needed by applications and workflows. 

A centralized management solution with a single-pane-of-glass view like FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer enables streamlined visibility that reduces complexity. It allows teams to monitor data movement and identify anomalous activity, simplifies solution optimization, and centralizes the management of firewalls and other security tools from a single location. It also streamlines operations for limited or under-resourced administrators and security staff..

Digital transformation is driving a majority of workloads into the cloud—public, private, or hybrid—for greater efficiency. As part of this trend, speed of execution becomes critical to make digital transformation initiatives a success. Because of this, manual processing and legacy technologies can be an impediment to the business. Hence, having proper workflows automated and optimized will help speed execution and enable organizations to be more effective at what they do best.

FortiManager helps decrease threat remediation time from months to minutes by coordinating policy-based, automated response actions across the Security Fabric’s integrated solutions.
 

Attacks against enterprises are becoming more sophisticated and harder to detect. To make matters worse, the widespread practice of deploying disparate and disconnected security products inhibits threat intelligence sharing. This means that network defenses cannot quickly spot and coordinate timely responses against advanced threats, especially across increasingly dispersed network infrastructures.

Advanced threat detection and streamlined security visibility from FortiAnalyzer reduces complexity and decreases the time to detection of threats. This allows teams to easily monitor data movement and identify anomalous activity.

Compliance management is typically a very manual and tedious process, often involving multiple full-time staff and requiring months of work to get right. Data must be aggregated from multiple point security products and then normalized to ensure that regulatory controls are reported accurately. To do this, network and security staff must monitor security controls using each individual vendor’s audit tools and then correlate that information to prove compliance. This complex and unwieldy auditing process is not only inefficient, but far too often also ineffective.

FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer not only automate compliance tracking and the reporting of industry regulations and security standards—this process is integrated at the network operations layer. FortiManager natively provides the capability of evaluating the network environment against best practices. Network operations teams can then apply and enforce them on the network to protect against cyber threats. FortiAnalyzer offers an in-depth analysis of network operations to determine the scope of risk in the attack surface and then identifies where immediate response is required.