Context Security Workshop

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Over the past few years, network security has experienced what are arguably the most dramatic changes in its history. As the consumerization of IT continues to sweep through enterprises, the number and types of threats have sharply increased, and the techniques used to avoid detection have become increasingly sophisticated. Additionally, the lines have been blurred between legitimate business applications and those that pose threats to employee productivity or network security.

Simply allowing or blocking a specific application is no longer adequate – or necessarily appropriate. Even those applications IT decides to block can often hop ports and protocols, requiring administrators to add multiple layers of policy in addition to the tens of thousands that already exist. As a result, policies are difficult to manage, often miss critical threats, and fail to meet the evolving security needs of the business. These policies are also easily broken by small changes to the firewall, which negatively impact business operations.

Sweeping changes are required to effectively combat this growing problem. Effective security requires proactive, comprehensive security profiling based on a wide range of attributes to determine who is doing what, where, when, and how – combined with deep insights into the global threat landscape and a comprehensive analysis of the reputation of network traffic sources. Together, these provide a real-time understanding of threats and other malicious activities that can adversely affect the network.

Learn how customers (will be specified closer to workshop date) have gone beyond “next generation” firewalls to protect networks with context-aware security that delivers deep network insight and control. Using context-aware security, customers have determined who’s trying to access what type of content, where, when, from what application, and the device being used.

In addition to this deep level of insight, we’ll explore how companies use simplified policies that correlate directly between what IT must enforce and the company’s business rules to achieve a higher level of security, while reducing the total number of policies.

Recognizing that applications like Facebook and YouTube also have legitimate business uses, we’ll highlight how companies use precision-based permissions that enable access to key aspects of these applications, while blocking others. Additionally, we’ll show how permissions can easily vary between groups within an organization.