Page 4 - CT Innovation in Education, July 2021

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Gaining Total Visibility
Campus IT needs a consistent view into how data flows through the network, cloud and endpoints; otherwise, security will continue to be a hit-and-miss remedy.
SECURITY THREATS IN HIGHER EDUCATION
today are only becoming more automated and
obfuscated, making point solutions or the old notion of “best of breed” woefully inadequate. The proliferation of cloud computing, web-based applications and services, not to mention the need to be more flexible in remote work and learning environments, requires the IT organization to come up with a new philosophy for securing assets both on the network and off. After all, traditional firewalls can only see traffic that flows through them. Traditional VPN technologies either hairpin all the traffic back to the firewall, thereby causing bottlenecks and bandwidth concerns, or compromise security through a split tunnel approach.
Neither approach solves the problem of encrypted traffic or provides the granularity to meet specific security requirements for the litany of diverse use
cases: the HR department using Azure for its employee system; central IT using AWS to augment the datacenter; increased demand by research for resources to participate in federated projects
To get a taste of the dilemma, one question I often ask campuses is this: “Do you know all of the cloud services that your faculty, staff and researchers are using?” In almost every instance, the institution is a multi-cloud
or hybrid-cloud user, and IT doesn’t necessarily have a consistent way to secure all of that. Like other aspects of security, every cloud provider has a robust set of security tools, but they’re all implemented in wildly different ways. And cloud is just one facet of the challenge.
An Integrated Solution
We can no longer piece together a set of disparate tools
to solve acute security or compliance issues. Really, the only way forward is to use a mix of integrated security technologies that deliver, first, a view into traffic and, second, a flexible enforcement model that relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify attacks.
Hunter Ely
Security Strategist, Palo Alto Networks
The solution starts and ends with visibility. The goal is to understand how data flows through the network, cloud and endpoints so that IT can provide a consistent security view no matter how services are being used. It’s important to understand how your users are tapping those services and to surface those things that traditional tools can’t see. As one example, we have a service called Xpanse, which will take an outside-in view of the network and start to build relationships, looking at how endpoints are interacting with other endpoints that are outside of the network, contributing to the building of a map showing how the institution is connected to the rest of the world.
Once there’s visibility, AI and ML can stitch systems together from a threat perspective. Think about all of your various security measures as sensors. The more sensors you
We can no longer piece together a set of disparate tools to solve acute security or compliance issues. Really, the only way forward is to use a mix of integrated security technologies that deliver, first, a view into traffic and, second, a flexible enforcement model that relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify attacks.
have, the richer the picture you can build. Then you can layer on things like automation to contextualize those threats, understand how they’re flowing through the network and take action in an automated way. AI and ML can take the flows, make sense of them and respond accordingly.
Vetted Tools
One of the reasons I love working with colleges and universities is because of their openness and willingness to share what they’ve learned. The Internet2 NET+
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