Uncategorized - Fortinet by Exclusive Networks

So, why is this appointment important, and why does it translate to a change in the traditional business table line-up?

An Australian first

Until now, cybersecurity has never had its own portfolio in the Australian cabinet. And no other government in the G20 (Group of Twenty), an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 countries and the European Union (EU), has a dedicated minister for cybersecurity.

With a reported 13% increase in cybercrime in the 2020-21 financial year (vs 2019-20), it’s a timely move, explains The Conversation: “With some 67,500 reports, that’s one incident reported nearly every eight minutes. Self-reported losses totalled more than A$33 billion, with more than a quarter of the incidents associated with critical infrastructure. Year to year, these numbers are on the rise. The growth in cybersecurity budgets over the past few years has signalled how seriously Australia is taking this. Allocated funds grew from $230 million in 2016, to $1.67 billion in 2020, to $9.9 billion in this year’s budget to implement the REDSPICE program.”

That breathtaking $9.9 billion budget (to be spent over ten years) is slated to make Australia a key ‘offensive’ cyber player. It will be invested in the REDSPICE (resilience, effects, defence, space, intelligence, cyber and enablers) program, which is designed to grow and enhance the intelligence and cyber capabilities of the Australian Signals Directorate.

While there are still discussions to be had about how the government will take the ‘offensive’ to counter global cybercrime, this level of commitment, along with recent legislation changes impacting critical infrastructure discussed in our previous blog, most definitely herald a new age for the CISO.

Cybersecurity as a business risk

While CISOs have long understood the importance of their role in the organisations they strive to protect, the Australian Government's endeavours have further validated the value they bring to the table.

And Gartner agrees, saying the cybersecurity leader’s role needs to be reframed.

To quote their February 2022 article: “The role of cybersecurity leader needs to evolve, as accountability for cyber risk shifts outside IT and an increasingly distributed ecosystem leads to a loss of direct decision-making control.” And Sam Olyaei, research director at Gartner, says, “The CISO role must evolve from being the “de facto” accountable person for treating cyber risks, to being responsible for ensuring business leaders have the capabilities and knowledge required to make informed, high-quality information risk decisions.”

Why are they saying this?

According to a recent Gartner survey, 88% of boards now regard cybersecurity as a business risk rather than solely a technical IT problem. (And 13% have directly responded to this realignment by setting up cybersecurity-specific board committees headed by a dedicated director.)

Gartner also predicts that at least half of C-level exes can look forward to employment contracts which feature performance requirements related to cybersecurity risk. This, of course, will affect those information risk decisions which are increasingly being made out of sight of the watchful eyes of IT and security. With new levels of contractual accountability for those decisions, Gartner expects to see “an inevitable shift in formal accountability to business leaders who are responsible to the CEO for delivering strategic objectives, such as revenue and customer satisfaction.”

All of this means that as the business takes on more responsibility for cyber risk, the role of the CISO must – and will change.

So, what’s going to change for the CISO?

Instead of the CISO being responsible for preventing breaches, Gartner says the role will be reframed to facilitate risk management. Cyber risk will no longer be deemed ‘security’s problem’ but rightly regarded as a business/organisational risk. And rather than security posing a roadblock to speed, it will enable more secure and agile products.

Quite a change in mindset and approach. But, where to start?

At the 2022 Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, Gartner shared their top 8 cybersecurity predictions for 2022-23 prepared by their cybersecurity experts, and their recommendations for the next two years as to which matter the most.

A starting point security recommendation from Gartner is to embrace zero trust. And with 60% of organisations planning to do just this by 2025, you’d be in good company. However, warns Gartner, more than half of those who adopt zero trust will fail to realise the benefits, saying: “…zero trust is both a security principle and an organisational vision, it requires a cultural shift and clear communication that ties it to business outcomes to achieve the benefits.”

And without reframing the role of the CISO and clearing that place at the table, it would be easy to miss the trust mark if they’re not empowered to make the other changes needed for success.

Zero trust, maximum benefits

Given that Gartner called out zero trust, and it’s an organisational risk – not just a ‘security problem’, let’s look at it more closely. Zero trust is a network security philosophy that states that no one inside or outside the network should be trusted unless their identification has been thoroughly checked.

So, it operates on the assumption that threats (from both outside and inside the network) are ever-present. Zero trust also assumes that every attempt to access the network or an application is a threat.

While these assumptions inform the thinking of network administrators, compelling them to design stringent, trustless security measures, the buck stops with the CISO. Without the right foundational tools and controls to work across the business architecture, and the top-down backing to enforce strict identity verification and other policies, the job’s not done.

The move to a single vendor SSE platform

Another critical strategic planning assumption that Gartner recommends CISOs build into their security strategies for the next two years is unifying web, cloud services and private application access via a single vendor’s security service edge (SSE) platform.

In fact, Gartner says that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will do exactly that.

As organisations undergo digital acceleration, their attack surface expands and network complexity increases. Simultaneously, cyber threats are becoming increasingly automated, sophisticated, and innovative. For today’s CISOs to deliver the expected secure, high-performing user-to-application connection, they need to look to cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA). Which is incidentally another of Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2022.

And with the carrot of a 90% reduction in financial losses from cybersecurity attacks, it’s small wonder that CSMA platforms like ours are becoming a strategic imperative for business, not just a decision made away from the table.

Welcome to the table, CISO

The Conference Board C-Suite Outlook Report 2022: Reset and Reimagine, says that while over 40% of CEOs globally feel their organisations are well prepared for a major crisis like a pandemic, financial instability or an economic downturn, less than 40% say they’re well prepared to meet the challenges posed by a major crisis related to inflation, cybersecurity, supply chain disruptions, or climate change.

Even more reason for reframing the role of the CISO and clearing that place at the table.

The time is right: SD-WAN is all go again

For many enterprises, the move to SD-WAN was another pandemic casualty. According to TechTarget, in their article on 4 key SD-WAN trends to watch in 2022, of the 61% of enterprises who started to roll out SD-WAN, only 36% had managed it or were still deploying it by the latter half of 2021. And if you don’t have time to read the article, the trends according to TechTarget are SD-WAN as a service; SD-WAN and secure remote access; AI in SD-WAN; and SD-WAN and wireless WAN (WWAN).

But despite an overall delay in SD-WAN projects, 2022 (and beyond) is looking hot for SD-WAN, and channel partners who embrace it, with good reason. But don’t just take our word for it.

First, let’s look at IDC’s findings in their snappily titled ‘Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan and China) Software-Defined WAN Infrastructure Market, 2018−2019 and Forecast, 2020−2024 (IDC #)’. In it, IDC report: “The Australian SD-WAN infrastructure market is a high-growth market with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 29.6% over a forecast period from 2021 to 2024. In 2020, this market experienced 25% growth on a year-over-year (YoY) basis. The 2020 growth rate is strong; however, it is considered a relatively slow one for this market because of disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The market is expected to perform even stronger from 2021 onwards.”

In the same report, IDC predicts the Australian SD-WAN infrastructure market will continue performing well in years to come as SD-WAN technology becomes the primary means of connectivity within an enterprise.

And that’s part of a worldwide trend. In IDC’s MarketScape: Worldwide SD-WAN Infrastructure 2021 Vendor Assessment, IDC says that “The SD-WAN infrastructure market is highly competitive and undergoing important strategic shifts.” Their key findings conclude that “SD-WAN remains one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market due to this technology's ability to improve user and application experiences, provide integrated connectivity and security, enable seamless connectivity to the cloud and hosted applications, and provide an opportunity for organisations to save money.”

And critically, for those partners looking for opportunities (and aren’t we all?), IDC reported, “In 2020, the SD-WAN infrastructure market grew 18.5%. Through 2025, IDC estimates that the market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 18.9%.”

In Frost Radar™: Global SD-WAN Vendor Market, 2021, a paper by the research team at Frost and Sullivan, says that adopting SD-WAN is a strategic imperative. Pointing out that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, Frost regards SD-WAN technology as critical in enabling organisations to optimise their available bandwidth for remote workers and to gain momentum as the WFH movement grows.

So, you get it. SD-WAN is here to stay and here to grow – with or without you.

The technology is right: SD-WAN, but not as you knew it

While SD-WAN was originally positioned as an MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) killer in 2015, as more features have been added, the ROI has been greater than ever anticipated. On top of the connectivity savings delivered by SD-WAN, come significant security and performance benefits, says SecurityBrief Australia.

IDC’s MarketScape: Worldwide SD-WAN Infrastructure 2021 Vendor Assessment notes, “One of the most significant developments in the market in recent years has been the advancement of integrated security functionality with SD-WAN products.”

That security functionality, says IDC, commonly includes “intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS), next-generation firewall (NGFW), and content/web/URL filtering, as well as integrations with third-party security tools, most commonly with cloud access security brokers (CASBs) or secure web gateway (SWG) providers.” To note, the combination of cloud-managed networking and security capabilities in one SD-WAN solution by a vendor is SASE (secure access service edge).

Along with security, IDC cites deployment options, the ability to build integrated management features across the LAN, WLAN and SD-LAN), and visibility and analytics as important considerations for SD-WAN buyers.

End-users are always right: SD-WAN in action

We know that SD-WAN is a dry topic. Important, but dry. So, let’s turn to an end-user perspective to illustrate the importance of SD-WAN, and the difference it can make to you and your customers.

Australian rental company, Kennards Hire, has over 180 branches and nearly 1500 employees across Australia and New Zealand. As a technology-forward business, Kennards moved key workloads to the cloud, developed applications that leverage IoT technologies and run in a Microsoft Azure environment, and migrated their ERP to AWS.

With its employees spread across 180 branches, and all needing access to key software solutions residing in multiple public clouds, Kennards found it no longer made sense to route all traffic through its primary data centre. Its MPLS connections were expensive, and along with an inflexible telecommunications provider, the Kennards Hire leadership team felt their ability to evolve was being hindered, not helped.

They decided to shift the branch locations’ networking to direct internet connectivity via SD-WAN, leveraging higher-performance connections that don’t have to be routed through their corporate data centre – while avoiding any reduction in data and application security.

Kennards Hire selected Fortinet solutions to provide SD-WAN functionality, along with the same security capabilities that protect the company’s data centre. To consolidate and simplify security at the branches, the company deployed the Fortinet SD-Branch solution, which includes Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, to provide fast, reliable, efficient, and secure connectivity among corporate branches and the cloud.

The overall outcome? Kennards experienced improved network performance and reliability across all 180 branches in just eight weeks. Rollout time, to bring a branch’s networking and security online – just 20 minutes. The company has reduced the number of staff required to manage security and networking companywide and has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

For a customer-focused company like Kennards, the CX was even more important. “Prior to Fortinet, we faced a lot of issues around system downtime and interruptions, which ultimately affected our customer experience. We want to keep the customers coming back; we want to keep them happy. To do that, we need to empower the branches to run as seamlessly as possible,” said Nicolas Aragnou, the company’s IT infrastructure lead.

Getting it right.

With the impact of the pandemic fading (but not forgotten), the proven market potential and growth opportunities, the technological advancements, and the feel-good stories from end-users, SD-WAN is here to stay.

Now it’s just up to you to find your SD-WAN and only and live happily ever after.

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