A CISO's Guide to Hybrid Mesh Firewall Platforms

Essentials for Meeting Tomorrow’s Security Needs with Confidence

Hybrid Is the New Norm

If you need to secure your hybrid environment – or if you require more than two forms of firewall deployments to cover your hybrid workforce and environment – then this is the guide for you. Every new cloud, remote site, private datacenter, or hybrid employee adds complexity to your distributed digital environment. As a result, there is high demand for unified solutions that protect the most critical areas of an organization’s IT infrastructure. Hybrid mesh firewall platforms have emerged to address this gap, providing unified security management to protect diverse digital environments through multiple firewall form factors. According to Gartner, "A hybrid mesh firewall (HMF) is a multi-deployment mode firewall, including hardware, virtual appliance and cloud-based options, with a unified cloud-based management plane."

Why Traditional Network Security is Not Delivering

As a CISO, you need to contend with balancing security risk and business needs such as agility to define a policy that meets your company’s objectives. Increasing cyber resiliency across all aspects of your infrastructure – data center, cloud, work-from-home, roaming users, branch offices, and enterprise networks – involves managing not just one, but multiple firewall types, adding management complexity to other security obstacles in the mix.

Compliance Complexity

When organizations secure their attack surface using multiple best-of-breed solutions, the result is a Swiss cheese-type infrastructure riddled with blind spots. It becomes extremely challenging to maintain compliance consistently while managing multiple tools and their unique policies.

Increased Risk of Cyber Attacks

In the hybrid working model, each environment requires different firewall enforcement points, increasing the risk of cyber vulnerabilities and breaches. For instance:

• The perimeter of an enterprise network often requires on-premises firewalls.
• Data centers, with their specific segmentation needs, may rely on a combination of hardware and virtual firewalls.
• The Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) approach streamlines security for global and hybrid workforces.
• Cloud-native firewalls, tailored for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments, provide scalable and flexible protection.

However, the complexity does not stop there. These firewalls often need to integrate with diverse systems and controls, including IoT (Internet of Things) devices, Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), and SD-WAN. Security teams often don’t have enough personnel nor the time to spend learning the various ins and outs of multiple security tools from different vendors. This results in security gaps and a weakened risk posture, a situation which can be addressed by a consolidated architecture. As detailed below, risk management, regulatory compliance, administration overhead, and budget issues are all challenges that arise in securing your distributed enterprise.

Administration and Operations Overhead

One of the largest problems stemming from a best-of-breed architecture is that security administrators have to move between numerous different consoles to create and update policies and keep security controls up to date. Having a patchwork of disparate tools results in your cyber security IT staff needing to spend time and resources learning new features and dashboards. For security operations (SecOps) analysts, a centralized view of events is critical to avoid the hassle of dealing with an overabundance of uncorrelated alerts, as such complexity costs time and effort, increasing your risk of falling victim to cyber threats. A consolidated solution is needed to eliminate silos, centralize management, increase visibility, improve efficiency, and shift to a unified approach that strengthens your security posture.

Procurement and Budget Limitations

Budgets are always a top concern for security executives. With more point products come more licenses and more security personnel to operate them, which means a higher budget is required for your security department. Moreover, each new tool requires integration into your existing security stack, costing time, effort and money. With multiple enforcement types leading to different pricing models, traditional models with complex pricing and licensing are no longer sufficient. As cyber security needs change, organizations should have the flexibility to deploy different firewall form factors without being confined to a single type. The fastest way to reduce your total cost of operations is by reducing the total number of security tools that your organization uses, and automating cross-product and cross-tool workflows for effective mitigation and operations across your digital infrastructure.