By Sean Campbell, Director, Canadian Channels, Fortinet
Chances are that if your customers didn’t face a serious cybersecurity attack in 2019, they very likely might in 2020.
While the human condition is to avoid change, that tendency can be incredibly risky in the cybersecurity space. The success of your customers’ cybersecurity efforts depends on them to always be on their toes, including recognizing the constantly evolving, modern threats targeting their distributed network architectures. It is essential to remember that what may have once been an effective cybersecurity strategy could now be obsolete as threat actors continue to move the bar on things like stealth, speed, and efficiency.
What’s more, your customers’ own digital worlds will likely have changed since their current security strategy was first introduced, with digital transformation bringing in new applications, devices, cloud environments, or SD-WAN solutions. What may have once been buttoned up has likely been made less effective through such things as cloud adoption, IoT and endpoint device proliferations, and security vendor and solution sprawl. There’s also the risk that critical vulnerabilities have crept into your customers’ networks that they aren’t even aware of, potentially serving as vectors for modern cyberattacks. This situation is even more challenging when it comes to legacy security solutions that may no longer be able to provide the next generation of cybersecurity today’s modern networks require.
In order to ensure your customers are maintaining rigid and effective security postures – and to help strengthen your existing relationships by more deeply establishing you as a trusted advisor – all security partners should start off 2020 by offering their customers a full and thorough Cyber Threat Assessment offering, like this one available through Fortinet.
Overview
What’s involved? Let’s look at Fortinet’s CTAP as an example. Most threat assessments start by deploying a collection and analysis devices into a security infrastructure. Then, without impacting operations, it begins to track and log up to – in our case – seven days of activity. At the end of the exercise, a full report is produced that provides you and your customer with a full picture of what devices and applications are running on their network, where performance could be improved, where security tools are falling short, and most importantly, where malicious content is slipping past undetected.
Armed with this information, both you and the organization will be better positioned to develop a strategy for effectively addressing these issues.
Benefits for customers
From an efficiency perspective, a thorough assessment has the added benefit of reviewing the overall performance capability of a network, especially at high traffic, providing customers with an overview of its capabilities under load, as well as its needs and limitations, arming your customers with the information they need to optimize performance as well as security.
Benefits for security partners
Sean Campbell, Director Canadian Channels, Fortinet
An assessment can also open the door to valuable customer conversations in a way that feels organic and adds real value. By providing a thorough, data-driven review of your customers’ network, you are creating an effective and understandable map of where they are vulnerable, the threats they currently face, where issues like performance are harming their ability to meet their business objectives, and where you and organizations like Fortinet can work together to provide the tools needed to support them in meeting these cybersecurity and networking objectives.
By empowering your customers with real, granular information about their networks they will be able to better define their security needs and quantify the cost and risks of leaving those open. This translates to accelerated purchase decisions, shorter sales cycles, and higher close rates.
Smoother SD-WAN adoption
This year we also launched a new assessment offering geared to address the challenges faced by businesses when SD-WAN is introduced, especially those implementations performed without consultation from the security team. While an SD-WAN solution can be beneficial for businesses, if not properly implemented it can create security gaps that leave the organization exposed to determined cybercriminals. An assessment focused on new SD-WAN deployments allows partners and customers to quickly identify these gaps and, more importantly, highlight the risks of not integrating security from the outset.
As the threat landscape continues to shift and new digital innovations are made, your customers need the ability to remain agile in their cybersecurity efforts. Looking into 2020 and the mood of apathy that can creep into some IT teams, it’s important that you mobilise your customers by setting out a compelling case for why change and review is needed so they can tackle the year ahead protected and secure.
Learn more about Fortinet’s Cyber Threat Assessment Program.
