Enterprises are finding that if principal security functions such as firewall, AV, IPS and content filtering are not sufficiently integrated, then they face the double-whammy of sluggish network/application performance and weakened overall security posture. Hardly surprising then that 90% of European mid-sized and large organisations are seeking to consolidate some security functions in order to reduce opex, lower management complexity and tighten security against blended threats and sophisticated application exploits.

Can encouraging ‘teamwork’ within your security infrastructure ever be that easy?  With the correctly automated approach, it can be. Certainly, this should include a licensing model that doesn’t unduly complicate or hinder the evolution of your network, as well as a technology set that brings best-of-breed security capabilities but without the attendant truckload of hardware, and continuing frustrations over network latency.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.6

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Whether it is PCI, CoCo, SOX, HIPAA or MIFID, overcoming the next compliance ‘hurdle’ can be an enormous drain on already overstretched IT resources.

As well as being highly disruptive, compliance mandates, and the compliance auditors who scrutinise organisations against them, place extraordinary demands upon logging, reporting and auditing processes.  Frustratingly, these will be different for every compliance requirement and, because there are few hard-and-fast guidelines about what really constitutes compliance, they will emerge in unique response to an organisation’s business apparatus.

The resulting mish-mash of compliance management systems, controls and templates can take an age to construct, cost a huge budget to maintain, and consume significant resources to develop and improve.  To alleviate these problems, and improve the ongoing compliance status of your organisation, automation of these processes is essential.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.4

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Databases hold the most critical information within an organisation, and so require a tightly orchestrated range of controls to secure and audit their usage.

Many such controls are manual, making them very expensive and time-consuming to manage, and have difficulty keeping pace as application versions, staff members and threats constantly evolve.

Automation of database security controls, meanwhile, can dramatically increase the efficiency of security enforcement, assure compliance to mandates such as PCI & SOX, and improve working practices.  Without it, organisations struggle to maintain intelligence around what databases exist, how they are patched, who has access to them, and what individual access policies allow.  The problem is compounded within multi-vendor database environments.

Being able to accelerate security and compliance enables organisations to drive down costs but also decrease the risks inherent with managing databases. Organisations seeking to protect themselves from attack by the implementation of controls can minimise risk and effectively secure their database assets through automation.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.7

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It is essential that IT managers know what each port in their network is being used for.  Yet even understanding that individual ports are being used at all is beyond most IT departments, who have to conduct time-consuming, inefficient and risky manual processes in order to make decisions that affect the entire organisation.

Instead, when called upon to isolate security breaches, investigate outages or to scope the network prior to expansions and upgrades, organisations have the opportunity to automate port intelligence.  This makes tasks far more cost-efficient, streamlined, responsive and less time consuming.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.7

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Somewhere deep inside the hundreds of millions of pieces of event data produced daily by routers, firewalls, identity and access management infrastructure, applications and all other components of a large enterprise network and security infrastructure are the key clues for how to avert potential disaster. In fact, there is everything you need to respond to ongoing threat levels, internally and externally. While manually sifting through it all is good practice for security forensics and essential for proving business compliance, it is typically a hugely inefficient process; even more so when placed under necessarily heavy scrutiny.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.5

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It seems the only people who really understand ‘core network services’ such as DHCP, DNS, RADIUS and TFTP are the ones who are up to their eyebrows in it every day. What strategic-level CIOs and IT directors need to understand is that it’s essential, it’s complicated and it’s ripe for automation.

AUTOMATED IT RATING: 4.3

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