Mobility and cloud adoption conspire to explode security appliance costs

In my last blog post, I made the case that increasing workforce mobility and enterprise cloud adoption will disrupt traditional cybersecurity stacks in 2020. I argued that organizations that didn’t take these macro trends into account and radically rethink their cybersecurity strategies were putting their users, systems, and data at risk.

But security posture isn’t everything. In the real world, efficiency is just as important as effectiveness. Enterprises don’t have unlimited budgets—and every dollar saved on infrastructure costs can go toward threat intelligence, event analysis, and other proactive cybersecurity measures. As workers increasingly need to log on to new and powerful web apps, rich media websites, and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms from multiple remote locations outside the corporate network, enterprises have an opportunity to streamline their cybersecurity strategies—saving complexity, time, and ultimately, costs.

Changing work habits disrupt traditional security efforts

Enterprise users are flocking to the cloud. Office 365 is now used by 1 in 5 corporate employees worldwide. These SaaS platforms, rich media websites, and powerful web apps require constant connectivity to users’ devices. Every edit to a document and every change to a database needs to be recorded and synced in real time for other users who may be working concurrently from the same file.

This explosion in traffic puts enormous pressure on network connectivity and bandwidth—something that traditional cybersecurity solutions made up of firewalls and proxies (like secure web gateways) just cannot handle. Traditional Wide Area Network (WAN) architecture requires that all web traffic flow into and out of the corporate network through a central gateway, where it can be monitored and blocked if necessary.

However, increasing web traffic caused by cloud adoption cannot be forced through a central filter without seriously impacting performance. Local Internet breakouts can provide direct access to the Internet, but scaling branch security on this level is simply not something that appliance vendors foresaw or designed for—making it cost prohibitive.

The Solution: The Menlo Security Secure Internet with an Isolation Core™

Delivering security services to mobile users and branch office employees through the cloud is the most effective and cost-efficient cybersecurity strategy today. Called Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN), this approach attaches cybersecurity policies to each individual workload rather than to unmanageable website categories. Coupled with a cloud-based isolation platform that treats all web content as risky, a software-based (not appliance-based) cybersecurity approach can ensure that no malware is able to infect any user’s device—and it does so in a cost-effective, scalable manner that is ideally suited for today’s mobile and cloud-centric environment.

Rather than build a complex, expensive, appliance-based security network, enterprises should rely on Menlo’s Global Elastic Cloud to gain cloud-scalability, cloud-cost, and cloud-accessibility benefits. Built from the start to be multi-tenant, our cloud-based environment is able to support millions of concurrent users worldwide and more than 100 million transactions per day.We operate more than 20 ISO 27001 and SOC2-certified data centers in a dozen of the runtime regions serviced by Amazon Web Services (AWS) around the world, and we employ geo- and latency-based routing to ensure that users experience the lowest-potential latency. In addition, redundancy has been built into every level of our Global Elastic Cloud, and we provide transparent and automatic failover between data centers with 99.995 percent availability. We also leverage AWS’s autoscaling features to initiate new instances within seconds for on-boarding and load balancing.

Making sure all users have ubiquitous yet secure cloud access is one of the most important tenets of today’s IT organization—and doing so cost efficiently is just icing on the cake. Contact Menlo Security today to learn more about the Menlo Security Secure Internet with an Isolation Core™