CISO Insights: 10 modern capabilities to revamp your security
Senior Content Marketing Manager
Knowing when and how to move your security forward has never been clear. Certainly, if you’ve experienced a recent cyberattack, updating or replacing security is top of mind. But, of course, you have numerous considerations including budget, staffing resources, and the gaps and vulnerabilities with your legacy security.
As a security leader, your expertise has helped the organization transform digitally. Your website and applications are the lifeblood of the customer experience and business growth. but they’re prone to cyber threats such as unwanted bots, DDoS attacks, and more.
Let’s explore a few reasons why it may be time to modernize your security.
Elevated security risks
Threat actors are getting more powerful and the risks have never been greater. The damage from cybercrime is expected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. No industry, no organization, large or small, is immune. Sensitive data – whether it’s user data or proprietary – is a sought-after commodity and a cash cow for criminals. Escalating threats can tarnish a brand's reputation, increase liability with financial penalties and legal and compliance actions, and impede future earnings and growth.
Security improvements are starting to outweigh switching costs
As security risks become more widely known, the significant improvements in Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) or Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and bot management tools are becoming clear. Modern security tools on an integrated platform can deliver more accurate blocking, significantly reduce tuning and maintenance efforts, and provide much faster time to incident resolution.
Better performance as a bonus
While it’s not the primary purpose driving these migrations, there’s a big performance bonus that can come along with these changes. When security leaders unlock their organizations to move to update their security and content delivery network (CDN), for example, they’re also impacting the DevOps teams. They get to use better tools, and the organization benefits from huge improvements in origin offload, reduced egress charges, and faster site and application delivery, all at the same time.
10 modern security must-haves
1. Strong security posture
Legacy security tools, including old WAFs, can set the bar incredibly low. Blocking threats with reduced false positives strengthens your security posture without sacrificing end user and customer experiences. Time-to-protection should be extremely fast, both at the time of deployment and in response to new threats. Think in terms of minutes to respond effectively rather than days or weeks. You get quick insights and answers to basic questions like “Why are we experiencing this traffic peak?” and “Is this traffic legitimate or not?”
2. More control and less dependence on professional services
Modern security is able to give you and your team control and the confidence to exert that control. For example, you can effectively make configuration and rule changes, review the impact of those changes in a simulated test environment, and implement them immediately. Over-reliance on professional services teams can be costly and it slows your time-to-protection with each new attack scenario.
3. Easy, fast deployment
When a new deployment is fast, your ROI zooms. Your protection starts in minutes, not weeks or months. This is an early indicator as to how flexible your new solution will be over the long term. A large number of Fastly customers can attest to their smooth and easy deployment. This is a core strength at Fastly – our Next-Gen WAF can be up and running in less than ten minutes.
4. Deploy on any environment (Vendor consolidation bonus!)
Part of being “easy to use'' is having a unified experience. If you work across multiple WAF instances, then you want to tune and maintain your security rules all together. Easy also means flexible deployment in any infrastructure and observability across all environments in a single pane of glass. Operate across cloud, container, on-premises data centers, hybrid environments, or at the edge, and know that you can make an architecture decision without creating a new security headache. Vendor consolidation is an additional benefit. By consolidating security vendors you can reduce the number of point solutions that are marginally solving your problems. In addition to achieving security and usability benefits, you can save on costs.
5. Accuracy without false positives
False positives have often plagued outdated WAFs. Moving to a modern, feature-rich solution can make it easier to block accurately without false positives. (Watch this video on the advantages of SmartParse contextual detection!) The ability to threshold attacks out of the box (in addition to blocking them outright) also allows for a fast time-to-value to get into blocking mode while not worrying about false positives. A WAF offering heightened visibility also allows you to adjust the thresholds over time with extreme accuracy, further mitigating false positives.
6. Easy rule-building and maintenance
Rule building should be easy, simple, and transparent. Building and deploying an effective new rule with confidence that it isn’t creating new false positives should take only minutes. These tools should be flexible to build rules that address whatever you discover. Regex rules can be useful, and you may continue to use them as part of your protection, but you need simpler ways to quickly block new threats as soon as you’ve identified them.
7. Preemptive blocking and threat intelligence
Users can get greater protection from their WAF. A modern WAF is not a purely reactive tool, but its advanced threat intelligence capabilities can help even more by blocking threats before they even make a request or reach your WAF. This has the added benefit of blocking large chunks of illegitimate traffic that were not easily identifiable before and can contribute to a measurable amount of traffic reduction at your origin. You can get additional details by reading this security report generated from Fastly’s Network Learning Exchange, which enables this kind of preemptive blocking based on verified malicious IP addresses.
8. Bot management
The impact of bots in the security landscape is huge and it will continue to grow. Your bot management solution should satisfy all the above points, including ease of use and deployment, more control, accuracy without false positives, and threat intelligence. But you will get even more value by fully integrating it with your WAF under the same single pane of glass and deployed across your entire footprint. By consolidating your bot management solution you can reduce complexity with your security posture.
Learn how Le Monde achieved security, flexibility, and performance with an integrated approach.
9. Observability with real insights
From the moment you turn on your solution, your data becomes visible. Real-time dashboards provide insights that make it easy to determine what is happening, why it’s happening, and how to resolve it quickly. This may sound too good to be true, but this is exactly the kind of new capability that is finally getting organizations to invest in change. Your access isn’t limited to dashboards, through professional services requests, delivered in batch reports, or incomplete in any other way. Your access to all your data and real-time logs gives you the ability to stream it wherever you want. It’s your data, and you should have unencumbered access to all of it.
10. Support
Exceptional vendor support cannot be discounted when it comes to your customer satisfaction. Security issues that get resolved quickly keep your organization protected. Poor support response with delayed resolution times can leave your organization at prolonged risk until a vulnerability is identified and resolved.
Security for the modern age
In today’s digital-first world, your organization needs modern, high-performing security capabilities. Web application firewalls are a critical part of your security infrastructure, and Fastly offers you the solid features and benefits as described above. Read this WAF Buyer’s Guide for details.
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