About Peter Elmer: Listening to customers for more than 30 years, Peter Elmer is focusing on finding the right solution for security challenges in hybrid data center environments, being agnostic if the challenge is related to network, cloud or endpoints.
In his career, Peter Elmer learned from senior leaders about voice communication switches and teamed up with young colleagues deploying the LAN network switching solutions in the 1990s. With this team, Peter Elmer brought cutting edge technologies to hospitals and finance customers. In May of 2000, he joined networking security group at Nokia, focusing on VPNs and upcoming IPS solutions. In 2009, he joined Check Point and absorbed the amplified portfolio of solutions providing guidelines for security best practices.
About Guy Israeli: With more than 20 years of experience in network security, Mr. Guy Israeli is a product manager leading the Quantum security management product line including Smart-1 Cloud, Smart-1 appliances, SmartEvent and the R81 train releases. Mr. Israeli started his career in the QA department acting as group manager, later moved to tailoring advanced security solutions to enterprises as solution center manager, which provided him with a wide background in the network security space.
At the industry-leading global cyber event of the year, CPX 360 2022, thousands of guests watched incredible presentations delivered by some of the best security experts of our era. Defining, explaining and exploring security complexity and nuance are critical in leading successful 21st century enterprises.
Network security experts Peter Elmer and Guy Israeli presented exceptional insights into how and why security operations teams have more challenging jobs than ever before. In this Cyber Talk interview, explore key takeaways from their talk…
How has network security changed in recent years?
Guy Israeli: Network security has become more complex. This has largely occurred due to the inability of security admins to manage and enforce their organizations’ security policies across their security frameworks.
There are several reasons behind this phenomena.
- Many organizations began their cloud transformations by moving workloads to the cloud while keeping other workloads on-prem, resulting in hybrid deployment. Users now expect to be able to connect to company resources from anywhere.
- There are many more devices on networks than ever before. Many of these devices are IoT devices; from printers to cameras, to Smart TVs, which make them difficult to track. Adding IoT to networks began a few years back, but the coronavirus pandemic accelerated IoT trends.
- In addition, cyber security personnel have struggled to adapt to the agility of the new world; where the DevOps team needs to move fast and to deploy new servers in production, which requires full flexibility for effective delivery. And on the other end, you have security teams that are afraid to lose control, which creates a situation of high friction between the teams.
- Lastly, internet traffic continues to double every three years, which is forcing organizations to scale their security systems accordingly.
So what’s next?
Guy Israeli: According to an IDC security report from 2021, in the next five years, almost 60% of organizations will shift more workloads to the cloud.
[We ran a poll during Americas and EMEA sessions: in the Americas, 67% and in EMEA ,62% of participants replied that they plan to move workloads to the cloud.]
And 65% of organizations are expected to modernize their data centers. In simple terms, this means that the hybrid cloud challenge is going to be relevant to an increasing number of organizations.
Security teams need to start planning for this in advance. And organizations will look to optimize their compute and storage infrastructure, which will enable them to scale and automate their data centers.
How is this really affecting us?
Peter Elmer: When we look to and listen to customers at the C-level, it is absolutely clear that the more automation is deployed, the faster customers are in detecting and preventing data breaches. In a recent example, it took one organization 73 days to identify that a data breach was going on.
We had a meeting last week, with a chief financial officer, about the latest IBM Data Breach Report. And, as seen in previous reports, this report indicated that one third of the cost of a given data breach pertained to detection and communication alone. Roughly another third of data breach costs stemmed from loss of business. The CFO to whom we spoke indicated that he really preferred investing in security over paying afterwards.
When we listen to the forensic analysts and the engineers who work throughout cyber security crises, they express that they really wish to have the best visibility in order to understand what is going on and what network traffic looked like before the event occurred…
For information about network security solutions that can prevent attacks, see this outstanding CPX 360 2022 breakout session.