Page 41 - FCW, June/July 2021

GameChanger
Blended Workplace
Protect a hybrid environment
Automation is crucial to monitoring dynamic on-prem and cloud environments.
Technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ ML) take protection a step further, making sense of activity on the network in real time, flagging problems and blocking them because the AI/ML is tuned to and reacting to known and potential threats across the world, not just at the protected agency. “That’s really important for state and local government organizations,” he said.
“A threat may be hitting a government somewhere else in the country, somewhere else in the world. It may be hitting another sector of the economy entirely, and you’re getting inoculated against it before it’s even focused on you.”
About half a million organizations worldwide use Fortinet products to get and stay secure, which means 6 million devices are using Fortinet security, all looking for anomalous and threatening activity and pooling data. It’s the definition of safety in numbers, and AI, ML and automation are the only way to do it.
Automation addresses today’s need to protect against old and new threats in established and innovative ways. Automated monitoring takes the guesswork out of what’s on the network and augments security for state and local agencies that can’t afford human cyber experts.
devices, it’s an average of 100 billion pieces of security data a day. There are not enough people on Earth, much less in Fortinet or the cybersecurity industry, to make sense of that,” Richberg said. “You have to automate it.”
Automating security “allows us to turn what is currently one of our big vulnerabilities into an asset,” said James Richberg, a field CISO at Fortinet, a global cybersecurity leader. In other words, it takes all the vulnerable entry points and turns them into sensors of anomalous and potential malicious activity.
Agencies don’t have to use Fortinet products to take advantage of the company’s security. More than 400 solutions from other companies are part of its ecosystem, and it can bolster security on premises and in the cloud. For instance, agencies that want to
“Digital connectivity, 5G, IoT, software-defined networking. While
part of ‘the attack surface’ those are not things any organization wants to ignore . They are core to digital transformation,” he added, but they bring risk and vulnerabilities and must be managed. “If the things I have to manage are talking to each other, I’m taking this digital attack surface and making it a big sensor network,” Richberg said.
use Amazon Web Services tools can feed them with the threat intelligence from the Fortinet platform. Many public-sector organizations are not
fully in the cloud or fully on premises, in part because they may be dealing with different vendors and providers, which have different controls. That inconsistency can create gaps that become vulnerabilities. Because Fortinet works in all environments, it closes those gaps.
“If you look at the data from 6 million
“Cybersecurity is too important to be parochial with your threat data,” Richberg said.
Automation in action
Fortinet deployed endpoint detection defense and response technology in three school systems. It caught not only known malware, but ransomware that was coming
in and defused it. “In those proofs
of concept, it actually saved those school districts from having the bad day of ransomware that would have taken them offline entirely,” Richberg said.