GEC NEWS WIREPalo Alto Networks and Tanium have entered into an exclusive agreement to provide an integrated offering which they claim will transform the effectiveness and accuracy by which large, distributed organizations prevent, detect, and respond to today’s cyberthreats. Sebastian Goodwin, Cyber security Strategist / Director Product Marketing, Palo Alto Networks talks to Soumya from Enterprise Channels MEA how Palo Alto Networks is changing the economics of cyber attacks
“Palo Alto Networks is changing the economics of cyber attacks by delivering a natively integrated platform that brings breach prevention capabilities across distributed networks, including mobile devices and cloud-based services.”
Sebastian Goodwin, Cyber security Strategist / Director Product Marketing Palo Alto Networks
We hear of the recent strategic alliance between Palo Alto Networks and Tanium; tell us more about it. What are going to be the major implications of this alliance for the two companies and for the cyber security space at large?
Given the speed and sophistication of modern cyber attacks, prevention technologies must be combined with lightning-fast detection and remediation to truly stay a step ahead of cyberthreats. Palo Alto Networks and Tanium will provide an integration that marries the Palo Alto Networks security platform with Tanium’s instantaneous endpoint detection and remediation, and enable organizations to fully automate and accelerate the otherwise manual, time-consuming process of threat prevention, detection, and incident response across even the largest and most complex networks.
Initial efforts of the partnership will be focused on Tanium integration with Palo Alto Networks Next Generation Firewall and WildFire, its cloud-based threat prevention service that automatically detects unknown, malicious activity and quickly prevents threats before an enterprise is compromised. Tanium will use WildFire threat intelligence to automatically interrogate every geographically distributed endpoint across the enterprise to validate the existence of an issue, identify all of the compromised systems and take remediation action as needed, all within seconds.
How shall this alliance give Palo Alto Networks a distinct edge over its competitive edge over the other leading players in the domain?
Palo Alto Networks is changing the economics of cyber attacks by delivering a natively integrated platform that brings breach prevention capabilities across distributed networks, including mobile devices and cloud-based services.
No other competitive offering or partnership provides the speed, effectiveness, or accuracy of our integration. Most competitive solutions require significant levels of manual (human) intervention to marry threat intelligence with incident response.
The Tanium integration provides customers a seamless method to automatically detect compromised endpoints. The depth of this integration is exclusive to Palo Alto Networks and builds upon our platform approach to protecting organizations. Our natively integrated platform is focused on prevention, the Tanium integration enables that platform to better detect and respond to cyber attacks on compromised endpoints through Tanium IOC Detect.
How will this contribute to breach prevention capabilities across distributed networks?
With shared actionable intelligence across both the network and endpoints, the investigation and remediation processes that used to take days, weeks, or even months can now be achieved in a fraction of the time, thereby dramatically reducing the risk and severity of security breaches. Applying this level of industry-leading speed and scalability, both on the endpoints and across the network, ensures that protection is rapidly applied at all layers.
Security teams now have an integrated solution that can identify and block the most advanced threats and zero-day exploits from spreading, ensuring that organizations can reliably investigate, remediate, and recover from any incident to stop an infection from escalating into a ruinous breach.
Which sectors of industry do you think shall be most benefited by this new platform?
This integration will benefit customers across all vertical segments. It is particularly helpful for large customers that have a significant number of geographically distributed endpoints.
The threat landscape and security portfolio has been evolving like never before- what’s the most pressing challenge for the enterprises currently in your opinion and what should they do about it?
The cyber security industry faces a major skills shortage while the threat continues to rise. Security department are inundated with security events and alerts coming from various detection and monitoring systems. Simply finding the important events that require response is like finding a needle in a haystack. Once that needle is found, there are often manual steps required to take action in an environment that uses disparate security technologies that lack integration and automation.
In order to counter this challenge, enterprises need to implement integrated platforms that focus on prevention. Preventing the majority of attacks will immediately reduce the volume of remediation activities. Then for those few attacks that manage to succeed in their first steps, and integrated and automated platform will immediately respond and take action without manual effort, thus preventing the next stage of the attack.
Do you think security is better handled by a managed security services provider or by an organization’s in house security personnel? And why so?
There is no simple answer here. Organizations need to assess the threats faced in their respective industries and geographies, the availability of in-house talent, and the economics of such a decision. Many organizations take a hybrid approach, for example by outsourcing certain 24/7 monitoring activities so they do not have to staff internally for an around-the-clock operation. Others will create their own security operations center (SOC) and handle all of that, plus threat intelligence and incident response internally.
