According to research from Perimeter 81, 50% of companies with more than 1,000 employees use 20 or more cybersecurity tools and solutions, which hinders their ability to effectively manage and secure their networks.
Organizations nowadays have to meet a growing number of regulatory, compliance and legal requirements. The more complex the network is, the more time consuming these requirements become, especially for security teams. This challenge is compounded by the high number of cybersecurity tools on an organization’s network. Network policy automation is one tool that solves this complexity, without sacrificing agility, while maintaining a strong security posture across on-prem, cloud native, and hybrid clouds.
What can security policy automation do for you?
Today, more than ever, organizations must manage a rapidly changing IT environment, an ever-growing attack surface, and a litany of regulatory and compliance regulations. Simply balancing security and agility is no longer enough: organizations must improve both and do so without making any sacrifices to the business. Corporate networks will continue to grow in complexity, making them unmanageable. That is where security policy automation comes in.
Tufin enables organizations to automate changes to their network access security policy across their multi-vendor, hybrid environment while staying compliant with security standards.
So, how can organizations go about selecting the right policy automation for their business? When choosing a policy automation solution for your organization, there are a few key things to remember.
Accurate network topology
A key component of any network security policy automation tool is network topology awareness. When choosing a network security automation tool, you need to make sure this tool is capable of understanding your complex and hybrid network. This is critical because you need accurate information in order to automate correctly. If you only end up automating accurately 50% of the time, then the solution can never be trusted. Accurate topology path calculations and policy analysis will ensure fast and precise provisioning of new or changed access policies. To achieve this, your policy automation solution should deliver more accurate network security data than your best human engineer.
Automated security policy generation and management
Security policy is the ruler by which security quality is measured in the organization. Without a security policy it is difficult to measure to what extent your organization is secure. However, detecting violations of your security policy in production is an afterthought. Best practices today encourage organizations to “shift left.” This means applying security policy guardrails during the change process, resulting in changes that are compliant and secure to begin with.
Security policy creation comes with unique challenges. In most organizations, there is no central repository where security policies are kept and updated. Instead, admins rely on spreadsheets or institutional knowledge. As such, policies deteriorate along with organizational changes. Without a generic corporate security policy, organizations have no policies on which to rely or to begin to create their own. Further, the process of policy creation and implementation typically takes months as admins use disparate tools to create them, and as we all know, no two policies are alike. It’s very challenging to apply consistent segmentation policies across a mix of network security solutions.
When choosing a policy automation solution, be sure that the options you’re considering can help you automatically generate and maintain an accurate security policy across the hybrid environment and make it an integral part of your change process. It’s okay if your organization doesn’t yet have a well-defined policy before automating as long as the solution you choose can help solve this problem.
Ability to scale
Most organizations today have a hybrid network and use IaaS and PaaS, not to mention the rapid adoption of container-based development practices. This brings us to our third point to consider when selecting a policy automation solution: it must have the ability to scale. The network and cloud environment you’re dealing with today may not be the environment you have tomorrow. The policy automation solution should easily expand as new network and cloud security controls are added. Finding a solution now that has the ability to easily scale alongside your company’s growth will save you headaches in the future. Organizations face many challenges today, and policy automation solutions bridge the gap between security and agility. Learn more about how Tufin can help you take the guesswork out of selecting the right solution for your business.
Finding a solution now that has the ability to easily scale alongside your company’s growth will save you headaches in the future.
Organizations face many challenges today, and policy automation solutions bridge the gap between security and agility.
Learn more about how Tufin can help you take the guesswork out of selecting the right solution for your business.
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