As you may recall, Hillstone Networks unveiled and announced our new brand positioning at the 2023 RSA conference in San Francisco. At this annual tentpole event for the cybersecurity industry, we introduced Integrative Cybersecurity as our north star value proposition along with its core tenets.
(To get our full presentation on this unique, holistic approach to enterprise security, feel free to view the recording of our webinar which details this powerful new model for business continuity and resilience.)
Consolidation is a cornerstone of Integrative Cybersecurity
The keys to Integrative Cybersecurity lie in three tenets which we have defined and laid out within the strategy. For more detail on this platform approach from Hillstone Networks, please enjoy the aforementioned webinar recording, or visit our Integrative Cybersecurity manifesto here. These tenets are:
- Coverage – The mandate of the modern enterprise is to use the technology and infrastructure it needs to grow and thrive. From containers to clouds, and servers to SaaS, an integrative cybersecurity approach offers complete coverage, regardless of the environment.
- Control – Maintaining the security and performance of enterprise technology is an exhausting balancing act. The right solution for the business isn’t always the most recent or most-popular version of it, but it always needs to be secure. An integrative cybersecurity approach is adaptive and puts the enterprise in control.
- Consolidation – Complex environments have attack surfaces that sprawl and edges that evaporate. Mitigating every attack vector with individual solutions creates opaque and siloed security operations that are both porous and inefficient. Integrative cybersecurity reduces complexity through consolidation.
Given that we laid out these tenets of Integrated Cybersecurity in April 2023, we were delighted, naturally, to see several aspects of it validated at Gartner’s annual Security and Risk Management Summit just a few weeks later in June.
Gartner’s insights on cybersecurity consolidation
As usual, Gartner’s insights on the topic of consolidation are particularly valuable to organizations, especially those undergoing foundational levels of digital transformation. Some notable findings on consolidation follow below from Gartner’s report titled Integrating SASE, XDR and Other Security Vendor Consolidation Trends in Security Strategy from Gartner analyst, Charlie Winckless:
- 75% of organizations are pursuing a security vendor consolidation strategy in 2023, up from 29% in 2020
- 65% and 59 % of organizations are consolidating to improve security posture and to improve security capabilities (respectively), as opposed to budgetary reasons
In another, lighthearted presentation by Gartner analysts Leigh McMullen and Henrique Teixeira titled, Debunking The Myths That Prevent Cybersecurity from Unlocking Its True Value, the duo offer alternative strategies to reframe the status quo in cybersecurity methodologies with an emerging point of view that prioritizes people. To that end, and with the value to human resources from consolidation clear, the analysts suggest adopting the following mindset:
- Minimum Effective Toolset: The fewest technologies required to observe, defend, and respond to exploitations of enterprise’s exposures
- Make visible and reduce the “human tax” of our technologies
- Make technology interoperability and adaptability into design principles
These two presentations by Gartner show both quantitative and qualitative perspectives on the challenges being faced by organizations. With an increase of over 250% in organizations pursuing vendor consolidation in just the last three years, it will be up to the vendors themselves to be able to compete through their suite of cybersecurity products to meet these new and fast-changing demands of the enterprise.
Hillstone Networks consolidates cybersecurity with an Integrative Cybersecurity platform
Today, the current conversation regarding consolidation of cybersecurity solutions tends to begin and end with XDR. Hillstone’s iSource XDR leverages advanced machine-learning and AI to detect, prevent, and respond to known and unknown threats.
However, while XDR embodies the spirit of consolidation, the reality is that it enhances the capabilities of many other solutions. Therefore, deploying XDR alone is not only impossible, but it is not true consolidation.
True consolidation comes from having a suite of security products that work together, out of the box, to reduce complexity and maximize efficacy. In fact, Hillstone’s Integrative Cybersecurity platform does just that. From our award-winning, next generation firewalls (NGFW) enforcing policies into, out of, and between data centers, to CloudArmour workload protection enabling secure application environments, Hillstone is uniquely positioned to offer coverage, control, and consolidation unlike any other security vendor.
