Cyber Security White Papers

In March, for companies across the United States, “business as usual” became business uncharted, as the novel coronavirus spread throughout the nation at an unchecked pace.

With customers demanding personalized experiences plus increasing cost pressure from competitors, bank executives are leaning on their IT departments to find agility and efficiency improvements.

Colleges and universities are increasingly dependent on cloud- based apps and mobile connectivity. Meanwhile, cyberthreats are on the rise, and compliance and security requirements are more stringent than ever. Universities must embrace a boundless network security approach. This brief examines critical network security needs for today’s universities and explores best practices for selecting an effective next-generation firewall platform.

The new normal requires the flexibility to provide education over distance. Supporting primary schools’ goals for today’s digital classroom can include secure mobile access, yet obstacles stand in the way of balancing security, access, performance and value. Best practices for effectively implementing a protected mobile learning environment include maintaining high security, connectivity, robust performance, and low total cost of ownership. This solution brief details practical steps to achieve those best practices.

Massive network traffic growth and changing business requirements can be a network security nightmare. Appliances can’t scale to meet unpredictable traffic peaks while upgrades can take time and resources to acquire, configure, tune, and operate. What’s needed? A hyperscale network security architecture offering flexibility and ease of use as business and technical requirements change. This is exactly what Check Point’s Maestro can do.

Let’s face it. Your organization is probably not doing all it could be to secure your users and IT resources. You know all about the high-profile hacks and exploited vulnerabilities, and you’re of course concerned. But security is not the only thing consuming your organization’s limited resources, and besides, you haven’t been seriously breached. So far, anyway.

As other companies have learned the hard way, hope is a valuable human trait, but it’s not a firm foundation for a security strategy. Fortunately, there are compelling reasons to focus on improving your enterprise’s security and steps you can start taking today to do so significantly.

As we learned from the Rightscale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera, cloud computing adoption is close to universal across organizations of all sizes: 94% of survey respondents reported that their organization uses the public cloud. We also see that enterprises continue to embrace hybrid and multi-cloud strategies (see Figure 1). Hybrid cloud adoption has grown from 51% to 58%, and multi-cloud adoption increased from 81% to 84% over the previous year.

Business agility, productivity, operational efficiency, flexibility, and profitability are undoubtedly the key drivers behind enterprise public cloud adoption. The public cloud allows compute-store-network resources to be acquired and deployed more rapidly. Once deployed, these resources can be scaled up or down as needed to meet demand.

Virtually every passenger car and commercial vehicle that has seats also has seat belts. And there is voluminous research that seat belts save lives and reduce crash-related injuries. For example, according to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Seat belts reduce serious crash-related injuries and deaths by about half .”

A significant figure, given that CDC estimates that “More than 2.2 million adult drivers and passengers were treated in emergency departments as the result of being injured in motor vehicle crashes in 2012” and that “Nonfatal crash injuries resulted in more than $50 billion in lifetime medical and work loss costs” in that same year.

In Introduction to Cloud Security Blueprint 2.0 we discussed the basic concepts (Shared Responsibility model, Zero Trust) as well as the advanced challenges that must be addressed by a modern cloud security architecture. Those challenges include increased attack surfaces, diminished visibility, dynamic and ephemeral workloads, automated DevOps processes, excessive privileges, and multiple cloud environments.

Cloud security is often more complex than on-premises security and must consider the shared responsibility model between cloud vendors and cloud users, and the additional threat vectors introduced by each new cloud service. Check Point CloudGuard Network Security provides cloud customers with the same threat prevention technologies as their on-premises security solutions and the same user interface, enhanced by cloud benefits of increased efficiency, better scalability, compliance automation, and improved agility.