Cybersecurity and enterprise security programs are quickly becoming a top priority for businesses. A successful enterprise security effort connects strategy, performance, and risk to keep a close watch on cyber threats while improving resilience across the enterprise. Leading companies are looking for the right security controls, incident response solutions, and threat intelligence platforms to proactively identify threats and shut down the most vicious cyber attacks, from data breaches, ransomware, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and more. While endpoint threat detection and firewalls are still critical in defending against security incidents and breaches, merely having a perimeter and defending it is not enough since the network’s traditional perimeter has faded away as new technologies have emerged.

Enterprises need a broader set of security tools and more unified but still flexible security framework to protect the enterprise. Here are this year’s  enterprise security trends to watch what to look for when evaluating enterprise security options.

Complementing traditional firewalls- Traditional firewalls are designed to control the traffic that is allowed to enter and exit a certain point within the network. The newest crop of enterprise firewalls, however, bring a new level of insight and management into the enterprise. These more advanced firewalls give network managers much greater clarity and control over network applications. Not only that, today’s firewalls are much simpler to deploy, configure and manage. Deploying internal firewalls is also one of the latest best practices companies are using to augment traditional firewalls and provide inside-out protection. Internal firewalls prevent the proliferation of external threats if they get inside the perimeter. Internal firewalls might sit in front of specific servers that contain the company’s most valuable intellectual property or a subset of user devices, applications or business-critical web applications that are cloud-based, for instance.

Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)- While traditional identity and access management (IAM) is designed to manage identities of internal employees and business partners, today’s enterprise environment also requires the ability to securely manage customers’ identities as well. Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) fills this gap by striking a balance between customer experience and security. This way, companies can continue to collect, store and manage customer data giving them greater customer intelligence required to provide more personalized and meaningful customer experiences, while also having proper safeguards in place. CIAM platforms help enterprises profile data and more tightly control customer access to applications and services, with applications like customer login and registration, authentication, single sign-on, access management, etc., all to minimize the opportunity for breaches.

CIAM solutions demonstrate the blending of security elements into every facet of today’s modern enterprise and show the need for a comprehensive enterprise security framework that covers everything from networks, email, web, and applications. Look for CIAM to help your company securely identify, register, and engage customers across all channels and devices, as well as to capture a wealth of customer insight and to use this information to drive business value by integrating customer data into marketing, sales, and services. 

Intent-based security- With the proliferation of containerized environments- where containers hold all the components necessary to run an application-  intent-based security has gained significant traction recently. Intent-based security adds extra protection at the applications level by relying on the developer to produce a more predictable and secure environment. Intent-based security also allows for a software-based segment and microsegment management of workloads across physical, virtual, cloud, and container environments. With these security tools, teams can separate workloads based on security requirements, abstracted from the network and infrastructure. Big security players in the industry have made recent announcements about intent-based security. For instance, Cisco is looking to bring together machine intelligence and security automation for a more comprehensive response to security threats. This involves the evolution of the network that down the road can anticipate operational issues, and continue to learn, adapt and protect against threats to stop security threats. Over time, many predict intent-based networking and security will provide contextual insights, and that will help transform IT from reactive to proactive. 

With a shift to a cloud-first approach to IT and an increasingly mobile workforce,  IT leaders have been pushed to look for the right tools and security partners to deliver a new level of enterprise security. Today’s most effective enterprise security strategies combine security intelligence, integration, and expertise to safeguard against cybersecurity threats.

Talk to Telapprise today about smart enterprise security options that combine today’s most sophisticated security applications, networking, and event monitoring tools, in addition to world-class support and management services of your entire network infrastructure.