Key Strategies to Secure Enterprises in India

Cybersecurity solutions provider Fortinet conducted its annual Security Conference for Indian CIOs in Moscow, Russia. At the conference attended by over 100 CIOs from SAARC, Fortinet emphasised that the best way to secure complicated networked environments was simplicity and recommended the implementation of Segmentation, Universal Policy and Collaborative Intelligence as three important strategies for securing evolving environments.

Presenting at the conference, Joe Sarno, Vice President, International Emerging, MEA, Eastern Europe, India & SAARC, Fortinet said: “Data centers are evolving along with customer demands for fast and secure cloud infrastructure and services. The growth of IoT devices and traffic represents both an opportunity and a threat to today’s digital businesses. Having a comprehensive security strategy, including a single pane-of-glass view of security management and policy across IoT to Cloud, is essential in establishing a consistent security posture for an organization.”

Fortinet, has outlined 3 key strategies to help organizations in India protect their businesses:

1. Segmentation – Networks need to be intelligently segmented into functional security zones. End to end segmentation, from IoT to the cloud, and across physical and virtual environments, provides deep visibility into traffic that moves laterally across the distributed network, limits the spread of malware, and allows for the identification and quarantining of infected devices.

2. Collaborative intelligence – Local and global threat intelligence needs to be shared between security devices, and a coordinated response between devices needs to be orchestrated centrally.

3. Universal policy – A centralized security policy engine that determines trust levels between network segments, collects real time threat information, establishes a unified security policy, and distributes appropriate orchestrated policy enforcement.

Which is why Fortinet has introduced its new Security Fabric architecture. This architecture is designed to integrate security technologies for the endpoint, access layer, network, applications, data center, content, and cloud into a single collaborative security solution that can be orchestrated through a single management interface.

Fortinet security experts also highlighted that the region is tipped to be at the forefront of  IoT growth, with market researcher IDC estimating that Asia-Pacific’s industries will connect 8.6 billion things by 2019,

As IoT devices are subjected to a wide variety of attacks including targeted code injection, physical alteration of firmware, man-in-the-middle attacks, remote control of devices to alter or disable their functionality, spoofing, or simply hiding of malware in the volume of IoT data, they are becoming a security nightmare for CIOs.

“It’s clear that isolated security devices don’t solve today’s cybersecurity challenges, and companies need something different. They want integrated security, from IoT to the cloud, with actionable analytics across their multi-vendor networking and security solutions, all delivered through a single pane of glass view,” said Sarno. “Fortinet’s Security Fabric has delivered on this technology vision with a complete rethinking of security for customers to implement more strategic approaches to stay ahead of the threat landscape.”

-  Amirthavalavan, Senior Program Architect, TAFE “With increasing business dependence on technology, security issues too are on the rise.  As our networks become more complicated, the tendency is to add new security devices to an already overburdened network. The Fortinet VIP Forum, through its knowledge gaining session, has emphasised that complexity is the enemy of security. Siloed security solutions with separate management interfaces and no meaningful way to gather or share threat information with other devices on your network are only marginally useful.”

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A S Rajgopal, Managing Director & CEO, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies“

Businesses of all sizes look towards managed services to be lean and scalable. As a leading data center service provider, our customers demand high performance and an agile environment without security becoming a traffic chokepoint. The sessions and interactions with security experts at the VIP Forum has revealed that service providers can execute thier cloud stratergies without performance barriers, and also address customers’ concerns about data security and privacy with the confidence that their data is protected within the Fortinet Security Fabric. ”

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“Online and mobile transactions have become commonplace and organizations moving to embrace and enable this new digital economy face increased security and data risks. Innovative attacks are aimed at exploiting loopholes as businesses start to share more customer data between branches, mobile users, and even through the cloud.  The VIP Forum outlined a holistic security strategy to help enterprises get prepared in advance for emerging technologies and their security threats. ”

-Prabhu P, Director – Network & Infrastructure, Zoho Corporation

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“A top priority of financial institutions is to protect sensitive customer information both from internal and external threats. As security threats evolve, we need to upgrade our defense against attacks in real time, while simultaneously ensuring data protection and regulatory compliance. At the conference, it was very interesting to know about how the Security Fabric can integrate multi-vendor solutions into one security framework and also help us manage all of them in one single pane.”

-Anubhav Rajput, VP & Head of Information Technology, Max Bupa Health Insurance

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“As a leading multi system operator in India, we need to deploy a security strategy that can see and govern vast volumes of data traversing an entire borderless network. The forum was a good platform to learn about a security fabric that weaves together security hardware, software, and communication protocols with a single architecture to deliver seamless, comprehensive threat protection from IoT to the cloud.”

-Venkata Rao Guruprasad, CTO, GTPL Broadband Ltd.