Edge security solutions are essential to your IT strategy if you’re looking for ways to secure your enterprise data and devices. They safeguard company trade secrets, customer data, and intellectual property from threats that may arise on network traffic entering or leaving your enterprise perimeter.
Look for an edge solution that automatically monitors internet traffic and identifies potential threats based on predefined policies. It should also have a robust patch management process that automates notifications of new patches and delivers appropriate fixes.
Increased Security
Having edge security solutions increases your company’s ability to protect against attacks. They provide a built-in security stack that protects against zero-day threats, malware, and other vulnerabilities at the point of access.
Unlike traditional backhauling of internet traffic over a WAN network to protect against the perils of the web, edge security allows companies to steer traffic to the nearest point of access. This reduces potential issues of attack and helps keep data secure.
Another critical component of edge security is a solid hardening strategy for the devices themselves. This can include a hardware root of trust, crypto-based ID, and encryption for in-flight and at-rest data.
These steps can help prevent hackers from adding malicious software to an edge device, changing the configuration of a system, or creating rogue edge data centers.
Security professionals must also implement tamper-proofing measures for edge devices, such as putting systems in cages that can be monitored inside the facility. The cell should trigger alarms in the company’s IT operations or security center if someone attempts to open it.
Better Visibility
One of the biggest reasons your business needs edge security solutions is that data and applications are often accessed outside the network. This is particularly true for remote work and employee mobility, where data can be easily accessed from multiple locations.
This widens the attack surface, making it easier for cybercriminals to access your enterprise’s data, including customer information and financial records. This increased exposure also opens up opportunities for hackers to launch DDoS attacks, compromising your business’s reputation and affecting your bottom line.
The best edge security solutions offer a combination of visibility, intelligence, and protection that detects vulnerabilities before they happen and then takes action to mitigate those threats. In addition, they integrate with your existing IT infrastructure to reduce costs and streamline management.
More Scalability
A scalable edge network is essential to support the demands of your users, devices, and cloud apps. Having the right tools to connect users, Wi-Fi access points (APs), and IoT devices more smartly and securely will help you meet those demands and scale up to your business needs.
As data grows exponentially at the edge, there is more pressure to deliver the performance that customers expect. As a result, there’s no longer a simple answer to how much storage, memory, and processing power you need to run your edge workloads.
Security teams are also confronting new challenges due to the proliferation of IoT devices that need to be built with security in mind. Typically, these devices have shorter lifecycles and are designed by companies focusing more on adoption rates and user experience than on robust edge security protocols.
These challenges require a new edge security approach based on a zero-trust model. Securing the edge requires a unified security platform that spans your WAN and cloud computing ecosystem, creating trusted identities and enabling granular authorization relationships between users, infrastructure, and applications.
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
One of the most compelling reasons to invest in edge solutions is their lower total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits. This is especially true for video surveillance systems, where technology operations and service costs can increase quickly.
The challenge in the security industry is figuring out how to measure TCO and make it meaningful to manufacturers and integrators. Ultimately, business leaders want technology to address their security needs while being a good investment that helps them save on operational costs and avoid unexpected service charges.
That is why manufacturers and integrators need to take the time to understand the real TCO of security products. This can help them identify opportunities to provide value to end users and demonstrate how their solutions will reduce TCO over time.
When it comes to capturing data at the edge, SD cards have a place, but they need to be used as part of a broader strategy for more robust, flexible, and secure surveillance systems. For example, an SD card can serve as primary storage in a radar device, helping collect statistics that could be analyzed on a server.
Greater Flexibility
In a world where remote and mobile workers are becoming more commonplace, securing their access to company data and applications is essential. Edge security solutions enable organizations to protect the data that those employees and contractors access while they work on the go.
Rather than relying on a patchwork of different technologies, edge security solutions consolidate a company’s security services into a single cloud-based platform. This helps organizations streamline their management and reduce costs, complexity, and risk.
Another benefit of an SSE approach is greater flexibility. Organizations can scale their edge security technology to accommodate growing business needs and support the hybrid workforce many companies embrace.
Moreover, SSE provides a single pane of glass to manage security policies across the network efficiently. This enables organizations to enforce data retention, deletion, and other rules based on policy. This simplifies security management, reducing IT personnel’s workload and freeing them up to focus on building their business.
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