As of 2023, almost 13% of full-time employees work from home, with over 28% working a hybrid model. Organizations are no longer relegated to centralized datacenters, but most aren’t fully remote or in the cloud: their data and operations increasingly follow a hybrid model. This shift is driven by distributed teams, including branch offices, work from home, and roaming work, as well as the benefits of scalability and flexibility offered by the cloud.

At the same time, In 2023 India received 2138 weekly attacks per organisation which is 15% surge since 2022. According to Check Point’s Cloud Security Report, there is a critical surge in cloud security incidents, marking a significant increase from 24% in 2023 to 61% in 2024 (a 154% increase) highlighting the escalating complexity and frequency of cloud threats. 

Adopting a hybrid environment is unavoidable, and Gartneranticipates that “By 2025, over 50% of network firewall deployments will involve more than two deployment factors from the same vendor — up from less than 10% in 2023.”¹ While the benefits of this new ecosystem are vast, it increases the complexity of security and management.

As CISOs contend with balancing security with business needs, they must grapple with strengthening cyberresiliencyacrossallinfrastructurewhilemanagingmultiplefirewalltypes.Theyarethusfacedwith a new set of operational challenges that must guide their choices when designing a hybrid security framework and maintaining an acceptable security posture.

Thebest-of-breedapproachofpointsolutionsisoftenoperationallyunsustainable,prompting enterprises to choose aHybrid Mesh Firewallplatform.

What is a Hybrid Mesh Firewall platform?

Accordingtotheinaugural2024Gartner®Market Gude for Hybrid Mesh Firewall Platforms, “A hybrid mesh firewall (HMF) platform is a multi-deployment firewall including hardware and virtual appliance, cloud-based, and as-a-service models with a unified cloud-based management plane. It is built to support hybrid environments and evolving use cases by offering mature continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline integration, native cloud integration, and advanced threat prevention capabilities extending to Internet of Things (IoT) devices and DNS-based attacks.”

At its most basic, a HMF platform offers multiple firewall form factors, centralized management, and integration with third party tools such as Identity Providers and CI/CD integration and others, to mitigate the complexity of using multiple point solutions from several “best-of-breed” vendors. A fragmented “best-of-breed” approach results in an unwieldy arsenal of tools that further lead to managementcomplexity,highmaintenanceoverhead,siloedvisibility,inconsistentpolicyenforcement, procurement fatigue and varying levels of security effectiveness across the IT infrastructure.

To ensure their organization’s security and business needs are met, CISOs must evaluate potential HybridMeshFirewallplatformsagainstseveralcorechallengesandthecapabilitiesthatcanaddress them.

Whilethereseemtobeanendlessnumberofdifficultiesinsecuringandmanagingadistributed ecosystem, the main pains CISOs face can be boiled down to four, as follows.

#1 - Increased risk of breaches across multiple environments

Eachworkingenvironmentrequiresindividualizedenforcementpoints,increasingtheriskofcyber vulnerabilities and breaches. This requires the deployment of several different kinds of firewalls, including on-premises, virtual, cloud native and firewall-as-a-Service.

Thissortofmulti-firewallecosystemneedstointegratewithdiversesystemsandcontrols,includingIoT(Internet of Things) devices, Cloud Security Posture Management(CSPM) and SD-WAN. Security teams often don’t have the manpower or bandwidth to learn the details of multiple tools from different vendors, resulting in security gaps and a weakened risk posture.

Solution: Achieving consistent threat prevention and zero trust

Theseissuescanbeaddressedbyaconsolidatedarchitecture thatoffersessentialthreatpreventioncapabilities:

-        AI-powered:AHMFinfusedwithAI/MLcapabilitiescanidentifyzero-daymalwareand phishing by relyingon big data and threat analysis rather than existing indicators of compromise (IoCs).

-        Globalpropagationofthreatintelligence:Advancedplatformscanshareintelligenceofzero- day threats across all enforcement points globally in seconds, including to cloud firewalls, firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), endpoints and mobile security.

-        Virtual patching against the latest vulnerabilities: A platform with an advanced intrusion prevention system (IPS) works to virtually patch against the latest vulnerabilities (CVEs), keepingyoursystems,serversandapplicationssecureevenifyourITdepartmenthasnot had time to patch these individually

-        Otheradvancedcapabilities:RecursiveDNSsecurityandadvancedendpointsolutionsare needed to block and contain threats for process-level protection.

-        Support for zero trust initiatives: To supportzero trustinitiatives across your IT environments, HMFs should offer granular policy enforcement using attributes such as user, machine, device identities, data sensitivity, target application, and risk.

#2 - Compliance complexity

Bydefault,thehybrid ITenvironmentisindicativeofsilosofmultipletechnologiesandteams.The disparate ownership over different security tools and security operations can cause acompliancenightmare for CISOs.

When organizations secure their attack surface using multiple best-of-breed solutions, the result is a Swisscheese-typeinfrastructureriddledwithblindspots.Itbecomesextremelychallengingtomaintain compliance consistently while managing multiple products and their unique policies.

Solution: Unifying visibility and forensics

A Hybrid Mesh Firewall platform can ease the need for multiple vendors, but there still needs to be cohesionbetweenteamsandenvironments.Lookforspecificfeaturesthatenableunifiedvisibilityand incident response, such as:

-        Unified console: A single pane of glass dashboard can break down silos and foster collaborationbetweenteams,enablingstreamlinedloggingandunifiedeventmanagement across firewalls, .

-        Consolidated visibility and logging: What if you could see all the logs and events in your environmentinoneplace,acrossclouds,remoteusersandofficenetworks?Sincevisibilityis key to passing audits, demonstrating compliance, and carrying out forensic investigations, this kind of consolidation can save hours if not days.

#3 - High administration and operations overhead

Thelackofcohesionamongpointsolutionsforcesadministratorstomovebetweenmultipleconsolesto create and update policies and keep security controls up to date. This forces IT staff to spend time and resources learning new features and dashboards and furthers the risk of security breaches.

Solution: Consolidating and automating management

Aconsolidatedsolutionisneededtoeliminatesilosandcentralizemanagementforincreasedvisibility and efficiency. Look for:

-        Acloud-deliveredmanagementsystem:Acloud-deliveredplatformenablesteamstorun with the latest security engines, features and controls with continuous, non-disruptiveupdates.

-        Agilitytotransitionandmanageworkloads:HMFsshouldgiveyouthefreedomandagilityto manage workloads in any hybrid environment, with security serving as an enabler rather than an inhibitor across hybrid networks, workforces, and clouds. Key to this capability is automated policy enforcement per workload type.

-        Robust cloud support through integrations with cloud service providers: By integrating with cloudserviceproviders,theHMFtrackschangesanddynamicallyadjustspolicyenforcement to enable set-and-forget cloud security administration.

-        Integrationwithenterprisesecuritycontrolsandarchitecture:Whenevaluatingplatforms, prioritize avendor withbuilt-insupport or API-basedintegrationwiththirdpartiestolimit the manual administration of your team.

-        Centralizedincidentresponse:Ahybridmeshfirewallthatdeliversunifiedmonitoringand alertingcanfacilitateextendeddetectionandresponse(XDR)andmanageddetectionand response (MDR) operations for proprietary and third-party security solutions.

-        AI assistants: Generative AI assistants can reduce the time required to perform common tasksbyupto90%,enablingadminstoquicklyupdatepolicies,resolvetickets,andverifyprotections.

#4 - Procurement and budget limitations

Budgetsarealwaysatopconcern,andwithmultipleenforcementtypesanddifferentpricingmodels, securing ahybridenvironment canbe costly and unpredictable.A best-of-breedapproachcanadd to the pricing and procurement complexity of multiple vendors.

Solution: Ensuring licensing flexibility to use any enforcement point

Using aHybridMeshFirewall withanagile, predictable pricing modeltoaccommodateevolving security needs allows organizations to respond to changing needs without requiring new licenses, purchasing approvals or vendor renegotiation. For example, a single per annum per user pricing structure that includes ALL subscriptions, hardware, softwareand support provides the flexibility to change enforcement points during the year as your IT needs change. While you maystarttheyearwith30%ofyourfirewallsinthecloud, 50%on-premand10%asFWaaS,you may want to transition to 50% cloud firewalls, 20% on-prem and 30% FWaaS. A flexible pricing model will let you make that type of transition without any change to your current vendoragreement.

Ready to Learn More?

CheckPointSoftwareTechnologiesisproudtohavebeenrecognizedbyGartner®asaRepresentative Vendor for Hybrid Mesh Firewall Platforms.To download the report, click here.

Tolearnmore,download the solution brieforlog in to the platformandstartyourtestdrivetoday! You can find even more resources here: https://checkpoint.com/solutions/hybrid-mesh-firewall/