Enterprises are leveraging hybrid IT, distributed Internet of Things (IoT) and endpoint devices, and 5G performance to build scalable architectures that interconnect all edges, including home offices, branches, campuses, data centers, and multi-cloud environments into a unified network. A hybrid approach is critical, because while cloud adoption is transforming networks, on-premises data centers remain essential for applications, data, and workloads that can’t be moved to the cloud but are still needed. And all of these systems need to work as a single, unified network.
Ransomware has increased 10.7x over the past 12 months. Not only is it more prevalent, but it’s also gotten nastier. However, hybrid networks also expand the attack surface. Without an integrated security strategy designed to span the distributed network, blind spots and security gaps emerge. When organizations add isolated point security products, there can be no end-to-end visibility and control, increasing risk. The resulting disjointed security can’t provide a holistic view of the attack surface or effectively stop and contain increasingly sophisticated attacks.
In addition, most data center security is focused solely on securing north-south data flows to create airtight, Layer 4 perimeter protection at the edge. But such measures are often ineffective against ransomware or volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. And to make things worse, these attacks are now increasingly being combined.