A single careless employee clicking where he shouldn’t. A single overlooked hole in the code. A single gap in the integration process as your users share data across networks and then your data protection is breached.
People used to rely on early detection to contain breaches but that surely isn’t enough when attacks could come from anywhere. This is why Menlo Security asked CDOs to try something new. They called it virtual air gaps.
Winston Thomas explains how an isolation strategy can keep your data safe in this article from CDO Trends:
“Detection is old news. If it had worked, we wouldn’t continue to see the headlines [about breaches[. The reason why detection is not working is that the technology cannot catch every single attack when hundreds of thousands are being launched every day. And all it takes is only one attack,” said Stephanie Boo, managing director for Asia Pacific, Menlo Security.
Some are resorting to physical isolation or containment strategies. It is not new but involved pretty drastic measures in the past. For example, governments often “air gap” their networks. The idea is to have their enterprise networks physically isolated from unsecured networks.
The problem is that modern enterprise users do not work that way. They are often mobile, accessing data, and connecting with cloud-native applications remotely. They are also continually receiving requests, data and information from outside their enterprises. Physical air gaps drain resources and productivity.
So, Menlo Security is making air gaps virtual. Their solution, a web isolation platform, follows what Gartner called remote browser isolation. All web traffic is passed through an isolated platform. Solutions like Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Data Loss Protection (DLP), and other security solutions then sanitize the traffic before it is sent to the user.
“In general, security solutions are very reactive. First, they will detect the threat, and then they will deal with it. Today’s threats are too sophisticated and too dynamic. Isolation is different. We do not detect threats but eliminate them. And elimination is a powerful word,” said Boo.
Cloud advancements have made web isolation possible. Increase in cloud infrastructure speeds and easy access to compute resources allow companies like Menlo Security to reduce the lag. So, for users, it is business as usual. And for remote users, who have downloaded a lightweight PAC, Boo noted that the lag is negligible.
