Is Your Security Stack as Adaptable as Your Business?

Erin Verna

You know the saying, “The only constant in life is change”? The past couple years have been a truly stunning example to that point. The way we live, buy, learn, and work has shifted dramatically. We’ve seen businesses across all industries take a major leap forward in their digital transformation journey, evolving infrastructure to enable remote learning and working, online sales, and more.

We are currently acclimating to what’s being called the next big disruption of our time: hybrid work. People that never worked from home pre-pandemic now plan to do so more often, as many employees and businesses discovered the benefits of more flexible working models. That also means personal devices and home networks are intertwining with corporate resources and sensitive data at a scale never seen before.

The New Era of Work and Business is a Golden Opportunity for Cybercriminals

As devices move in and out of networks and users request access to applications from home or on-the-go, it’s the perfect setting for cybercriminals to expose users and corporate resources to threats like malware. To add to the complexity, 80% of internet traffic is now encrypted and cybercriminals are finding ways to “hide” malware within encrypted payloads. Last year alone, nearly half of all malware (46%) was encrypted. Without reliable means to inspect that traffic, and to do so at scale without sacrificing service availability, businesses are facing significant strain on the network or worse…potential data breaches.

Is Your Security Infrastructure Keeping Pace with All this Change?

Considering this new reality, it’s time to stop and ask yourself: just how well is my security infrastructure keeping pace with all this change? And can I make the updates needed without bringing the business to a halt?

Many organizations today have amassed an array of security solutions and security vendors, and likely they’re manually connected, creating a daisy-chained security stack. And the typical daisy-chained security stack is problematic. When you have devices physically wired to each other one after the other in a serial arrangement, you can expect the following:

• Failure of any device in the chain will bring down the entire chain
• More complex configurations will be required given not every security device can be deployed in a similar fashion
• Removing or adding a device will make the entire security stack unusable in process

So, what’s the alternative? Orchestrate your security stack.

From Daisy-Chain to Dynamic Service Chain

Orchestrating your security stack routes your traffic through dynamic service chains instead of a traditional daisy-chain. That means you can do the following things all without interrupting traffic flow or allowing encrypted traffic to bypass without a security check:

• Seamlessly move traffic from one active security solution to another, and then change or update the first security solution
• Swap out a security solution via bypassing that solution entirely
• Update a security solution via bypassing the solution temporarily

And again, you can do all the above without interrupting traffic flow, traffic decryption, and inspection for the rest of the solutions in your security stack.This will save your business time and save you the financial headache of costly change management windows, ensuring traffic passing through your security stack is not accidentally bypassed during the change management process.

How to Orchestrate with Your Existing Security Stack

When it comes to ensuring every security product in your stack is in the position to do what it does best—say, let your firewall be a firewall versus using most of its CPU to decrypt and re-encrypt traffic—an approach that centralizes all SSL management and intelligently steers traffic to your security devices will be the foundation of your orchestration solution.

F5 SSL Orchestrator continues to be the trusted solution for decrypting, inspecting, and re-encrypting traffic at unmatched scale, making an orchestrated security infrastructure model possible. F5 SSL Orchestrator integrates with your existing security solutions to load balance, check health, and provide SSL offload capabilities so you can gain all the benefits that an orchestrated security infrastructure can provide, streamlining your security change management processes.

Want to Learn More?

To understand how F5 SSL Orchestrator can help you orchestrate your security stack, view our solution overview on Dynamic Infrastructure Security Orchestration. Or to discuss your options with someone from our team, email sales@f5.com.

About the Author

Erin Verna

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