IT security has never been easy. For as long as there has been digital technology there have been those who seek to exploit it, for reasons ranging from financial gain, to intellectual property theft, to pure vandalism. The tremendous productivity gains delivered by IT have always been matched by the need to monitor and protect those assets against malicious actors.
Digital technology isn’t just desktops and servers, however. New cloud, mobile, and social solutions have expanded the attack surface. Increasingly, connected devices – the Internet of Things, or IoT – are being targeted as attack vectors that organizations must defend.
IoT, including the industrial devices driving manufacturing, energy, and healthcare, has become top-of-mind for many security-conscious organizations. Traditional IT security methodologies don’t neatly fit the IoT paradigm. Foremost among the challenges is the sheer scale and diversity of IoT. Protecting a manufacturing line or smart building is fundamentally different from protecting PCs, servers, and databases. Security analysts have an understanding of IT assets that does not exist yet for IoT. Traditionally, IoT security has been left to system manufacturers or specialized IoT management vendors, a state that cannot endure in the face of increasingly sophisticated and damaging attacks.
All of this has created a consensus that IoT and IT security must converge. Managing this convergence is challenging exactly because of the issues described above. Legacy proprietary systems require specialized knowledge and protocols.
Operational expertise resides outside the IT security function.
An explosion of new devices demands scarce security resources even as very real benefits have organizations racing to adopt IoT.
NetWitness has been protecting IoT for decades. As IoT adds to the attack surface area, NetWitness is responding with the release of NetWitness IoT, a new SaaS-native IoT security monitoring solution that addresses the strategic evolution of IoT security and provides a path to the future. A full-fledged member of the NetWitness Platform, NetWitness IoT addresses the challenge of monitoring and securing disparate devices with a flexible and scalable solution for maintaining security at far reaches of an enterprise infrastructure.
NetWitness IoT is unique in that it supports both IoT operations staff, who understand the systems and how they operate, as well as the Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts who understand how threat actors operate. To support these both use cases, NetWitness IoT can operate as a standalone offering with its own web interface for operations staff, as well as an integrated offering to the NetWitness Platform, delivering IoT visibility to the SOC.
To support the range of legacy OT systems and modern, standards-based IoT solutions, NetWitness IoT has a wide range of industry partnerships. This allows NetWitness IoT to adapt to a broad variety of data and protocols while setting up for a converged future. In particular, its ability to support emerging edge-based IoT management solutions means that providing security for new IoT systems as they are onboarded will become faster and easier over time, maximizing scarce operational and security resources and allowing organizations to move as fast as needed in embracing the benefits of IoT.
NetWitness IoT is availably globally now. For more information or to request a demo, visit our product page at netwitness.com/iot. See the press release here.