We all know that cyberattacks are on the rise and the devastation they can cause. Earlier this year, a hacker gained access to more than 100 million Capital One customers’ accounts and credit card applications in one of the biggest data breaches ever. In fact, in the first half of 2019, 4.1 billion records have been compromised in data breaches. This could easily be the worst year on record for data breaches. Cyberattacks like these are incredibly damaging for enterprises; customers lose trust in them and walk away; crucial services are down for days and employees can’t do their jobs; and enterprise IT teams have the costly job of re-instating services and security. Enterprises are acutely aware of these security challenges but many don’t have the expertise in-house to build a security team.
That’s where you can come in as a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).
The cybersecurity challenge MSSPs need to address
Enterprises look to MSSPs to provide security solutions and expertise, which protect their business in the face of cyberattacks. Protecting their customers’ valuable business data is one of the top concerns for MSSPs. And, there’s never been more data for MSSPs to maintain and secure. Enterprises need access to all this data securely, at all times, while complying with industry regulations, government mandates, and corporate policies.
However, with the demand for higher capacity networks, the proliferation of mobile and IoT devices and the move to the cloud, there’s an ever-expanding threat surface when it comes to cybersecurity. When at least 72% of that traffic is encrypted, how do you as an MSSP get visibility into all this traffic so you can stay one step ahead of the cybercriminals? Because, let’s face it, if your customer suffers a data breach, who will they blame? Even the largest security devices face an unacceptable performance degradation when trying to decrypt SSL/TLS traffic on high-link networks in order to inspect it. It’s called the SSL inspection gap – the point where an organization can’t keep up with decrypting incoming traffic and maintain their network’s performance.
A new way to scale network security
There is a clear need to be able to scale network security. Historically, the most common means to scale network security has been vertical scaling by buying bigger appliances; when more bandwidth and capacity was demanded. This has led to increased and ongoing expenses for the MSSP, which is unsustainable. These hardware purchases are a temporary stop-gap; you need a way to scale your services in a cost-effective way.
There is a solution. If you scale network security horizontally, rather than vertically, you open up the possibility of unlimited capacity and flexibility; you’re no longer restricted to the performance of a single hardware appliance. With a software-defined model you can create virtual instances of security functions like firewall and SSL inspection capabilities, and continue to elastically add them as bandwidth demands increase. It’s what we did with web apps and it’s what we need to do with network security. But it can’t be overly complex or any savings on the hardware side will be lost on the setup and configuration front.
The benefits of network security virtualization
This is why we invented a turnkey network security virtualization platform. It creates high-capacity virtualized next-generation firewalls (NGFW), allowing you to achieve 100% traffic inspection on high-bandwidth networks, and scale network security capabilities as your customer’s needs grow. It eliminates the need for costly hardware refreshes.
This allows you as an MSSP to offer a new service to your customers: complete yet elastic traffic inspection which is tailored to their needs and can scale up or down at any moment. Our monthly subscription model means you don’t have to invest in hardware or unused capacity while you predict your customer’s future security needs, making the solution profitable from day one. You can easily and quickly add or remove inspection capacity on the fly, through a simple, user-friendly interface. It’s also a vendor-agnostic approach, so you can continue to offer the solutions you have today, or work with your client’s preferred providers.
With enterprises looking to MSSPs for the latest security solutions and expertise, you have to be able to guarantee the visibility and control of your customer’s network, data and users. This is unsustainable with hardware alone. MSSPs need to virtualize the security stack with a software-defined network security approach.