ISFW solution guide

Why the era of perimeter-only security is over

Published February 2016

Cyber attacks are on the rise. Breaches draw unwanted public attention, loss of reputation and customer confidence, and may result in heavy recovery costs for the enterprise. At the same time, as organizations embrace the latest technologies (BYOD, cloud-based apps, Internet of Things), traditional network boundaries are becoming increasingly difficult to control and secure.

Companies have been investing in perimeter security protection at different levels of the enterprise network – branches, campus and the data center – to prevent threats from entering their internal infrastructure. For the last decade, this has proven to be a valuable and effective strategy. In addition to firewalls at the network perimeter, purpose-build security solutions can provide application-level and multi-layered advanced persistent threat protection. Today’s increasingly sophisticated attacks, however, are still able to penetrate the enterprise network in many cases. Once inside, exploits (such as malware) can remain hidden and dormant within the network for extended periods of time before launching opportunistic attacks.