In today’s world of hybrid IT and workforces, I think it’s time to rethink our cybersecurity approach. Traditional firewall and DMZ ‘Perimeters’ are long superseded and Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) or ‘untrusted by default’ is the compelling strategy we need to embed across our systems. The monitoring and governance of a ZTA, requires comprehensive correlation between many different types of cyber controls – identities, devices, data, applications, locations, and more. The speed at which we can corelate security logs, behavioural patterns, and anomalies, is critical to the efficacy of our cyber resilience strategy.
The transformation to support employees to work from anywhere and store data across various platforms, has widened the risk surface well beyond traditional/legacy perimeters and this leads us to a strategy decision: continue with what has traditionally been seen as ‘best-of-breed’ individual point solutions from multiple vendors, or switch to a single-vendor natively-integrated, security suite.
The challenges with multi-vendor cyber defence strategy:
Complexity and Trade-offs: Managing multiple security vendors can lead to complex, disjointed security environments making it difficult to maintain consistent security policies that in turn, increases the risk of potential misconfigurations.
Gaps and Inconsistencies: Security solutions from different vendors do not always integrate well with each other leading to potential gaps in coverage making it difficult to achieve a unified security posture.
Compromising optimised states: Multi-vendor setups often lead to fragmented security solutions, requiring trade-offs between security, performance, and user experience.
Higher Costs: Using multiple vendors typically results in higher procurement and operational costs. Each vendor typically requires individual licensing, training and support contracts which can add up significantly.
The benefits of single vendor unified cyber defence strategy:
Faster Responses: Having less cyber solutions to interrogate, reduces time to investigate threats and in turn reduces the time to respond.
Holistic Solutions: A single-vendor platform, like Microsoft’s SIEM and XDR, offers a comprehensive solution that addresses the entire attack surface with consistent policies and unobstructed visibility.
Integrated Zero Trust Architecture: This approach combines the benefits of best-of-breed solutions without sacrificing consistency or visibility.
Enhanced Security and User Experience: Microsoft’s SIEM and XDR secures traffic and access everywhere, whether users access data from the Internet, public cloud services, hybrid cloud, or on-premises data centres.
CrowdStrike, Fortinet, and NinjaOne have significantly expanded their product portfolios to offer more unified and end-to-end cyber defence platforms. CrowdStrike, known for its endpoint protection, now includes cloud security, identity protection, and a next-gen SIEM solution. Fortinet broadened its offerings from firewalls to include secure SD-WAN, cloud security, SIEM, and endpoint protection. NinjaOne has evolved from endpoint management to a unified platform that includes remote monitoring, patch management, backup, and IT service management, ensuring holistic endpoint security and management. These continuing expansions reflect the industry’s shift towards providing all-encompassing security solutions rather than specialised point products.
There are still gaps and the integration and convergence of security log analytics between various vendor platforms is far from seamless.
Microsoft who’s integrated SIEM and XDR solutions comprised of Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender XDR (formerly Microsoft 365 Defender), and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, seems to be a little ahead of the rest with a more mature integrated suite of cyber defence solutions, leveraging the significant AI and automation investments they’ve made.
Maintaining ‘Best of Breed’
While we are a vendor-agnostic IT solutions provider, we do partner with all the cyber security vendors I’ve mentioned but Microsoft does stand out when it comes to looking at a unified breadth provider in cyber security. Microsoft has been named a leader in the Forrester Wave: Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms, Q2, 2024, with the highest scores in terms of their strategy. Gartner recognised Microsoft as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as well being a leader in Endpoint Protection Platforms.
By consolidating security solutions, organisations can simplify management, reduce cost, and improve their overall security posture. The benefits of a single-vendor approach to security, offers several benefits over multi-vendor security solutions, especially with respect to implementing a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA).
Ready to enhance your cybersecurity strategy?
Contact Ergo today to discover how our expert solutions can protect your organisation. Reach out to us now for a consultation!
Contact Us
