Are Your Network Security Systems Integrated?

Since I first got involved in the IT Security world one of the things which I have always found frustrating and inefficient is the disconnect between desktop anti-virus products, firewalls, and UTM devices. Solutions from one vendor never meshed with another so in almost every case managing these technologies for the customer was difficult, inefficient and frankly almost impossible. I always wondered when one of the major players would meld their desktop solution with their edge or gateway solution. Maybe you are asking why this is  important. How does this help my customer’s network or more importantly how does this help me from a management perspective?

Well if you could have both the desktop and the edge or UTM side talking to each other, feeding each side information about threats and what to do if there was an infection wouldn’t that be worth something to you? For example let’s say a desktop gets infected by malware and this information is then communicated to the UTM. The UTM then makes a decision to shut down the infected machine and quarantine it from the rest of the network. Remediation then takes place on the infected machine and just for good measure the rest of the machines on the network are also scanned.

I have been waiting for this technology to become reality for many years and now it’s finally happening. Sophos has been doing a tremendous job on the security front and later this year will be integrating this technology into their desktop and UTM products. For my customers their networks will not only be protected but will also be “intelligent” when it comes to security. Instead of having desktop anti-virus from one vendor and a UTM product from another vendor with no real ability to respond to an attack, Sophos protected networks will be able to respond to an attack without someone like me having to do anything!

This is really an exciting time for me being able to offer security products to my customers which actually work together forming a total solution with the ability to quarantine and mitigate potential problems automatically.