Page 16 - FCW, Nov/Dec 2017

CYBERSECURITY
SPONSORED CONTENT
HOW THE CYBER FIELD IS EVOLVING
New approaches are streamlining security and targeting the next generation
of cyber professionals.IN THE EARLY DAYS of the Internet, network defenders came up with a three-
orchestration. It involves moving rewalls’ processing and enforcement activities up to the cloud, in part because the cloud gives vendors nearly in nite processing power and storage space.
Cloud technology naturally o ers other bene ts as well. Unfortunately, some government leaders think using a cloud service provider that has been certi ed under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) means they don’t have to worry about security anymore.
Service providers’ materials clearly
say, “Security is a shared responsibility.”
When cloud providers are FedRAMP-
certi ed, it means that they secure their own environments. It does not mean they secure customers’ data. Agencies must make their own plans for protecting cloud-based data.
After all, if there is a breach, the agency’s leaders won’t go to the vendor; they will come to the IT team for answers.
Expand the Cyber Workforce
It’s common knowledge that we are facing a shortage of security professionals, with as many as one million open jobs. Yet women, who are half the population, make up just
11 percent of the cybersecurity workforce. That’s why Palo Alto Networks is partnering with the Girl Scouts to establish 18 merit badges for cybersecurity, divided into online safety and network security engineering.
Now more than 2 million girls will be encouraged and guided from kindergarten through high school to become cybersecurity professionals. The idea is to keep them engaged in those subjects so that they eventually go to work in the cybersecurity eld, where they can solve the challenges of the future.
Rick Howard is chief security o cer at Palo Alto Networks.
RICK HOWARD
CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, PALO ALTO NETWORKS
pronged approach to cybersecurity. It involved using a rewall, intrusion- detection system and antivirus software
to form overlapping concentric circles, so that if one tool failed, another could pick up the slack. However, as adversaries matured, they found ways to get around all of it.
To be successful, adversaries must reconnoiter a victim’s network for weaknesses, deliver a tool that exploits those weaknesses, and establish a beachhead on an endpoint—
at which point they can extricate data. We realized that instead of overlapping concentric circles, we needed tools for every link in
the chain.
Now small organizations have gone from three security tools to 15 or 20, while large organizations, including some government agencies and nancial institutions, are
dealing with more than 200 security tools. Unfortunately, agencies typically have the same number of people trying to manage all those tools that they had when they were struggling to handle three tools.
The traditional solution has been to throw more people at the problem, but we’ve reached the point where that doesn’t work anymore.
The Complex Role of Cloud
The latest approach is automatic orchestration through a platform that brings together all those cybersecurity tools. The ideal solution sits behind your perimeter and on your endpoints and o ers visibility into your
data centers and cloud deployments. It also reduces the attack surface, prevents all known adversary attacks, discovers new ones quickly and converts them into known attacks so we can prevent them.
In the past ve years, rewall vendors have been working on the next step in automatic
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