How Fortinet Technology "Zaps" Technical Debt: Part 2

Introduction 

In part one, we used a burrito shop analogy to detail an organization's technical debt challenges. With great intention, the owner of the burrito shop decided to hire one person to do each of the burrito assembly details (pulling the tortilla, adding the meat, cheese, lettuce, etc.) for a "more efficient" operation. Unfortunately, this caused several unforeseen side effects. Part one covered the first two challenges: wasted resources and operational chaos. In this blog post, we will wrap up the conversation by discussing the final two: missed opportunities and future maintenance.

Missed opportunities

It's been said that opportunities are never lost; someone will take the ones you miss. In the case of our burrito shop, multiple burrito builders were allocated toward similar tasks that coincide, which took away from the ability to diversify the business. One example would be adding delivery services to extend the customer reach. In the case of cybersecurity, having multiple overlapping tools requires significant staff overhead, with everyone having to become an "expert" on each. This could create missed opportunities around threat hunting within the environment, as well as proactive security defense and posture improvement.

Future maintenance

Moving forward, rules must be established to prevent these burrito builders from stepping on each other's toes and trying to keep everyone happy. Likewise, overlapping tools frequently require custom integrations, complex manual interventions and workarounds to mesh. All of these add up, increasing the difficulty of managing it all moving forward. 

Using our burrito shop analogy, we detailed two more instances where our resource allocation created substantial challenges for our business. Likewise, within our cybersecurity solutions, utilizing overlapping point products can create missed opportunities to strengthen your overall security readiness and create difficulties around maintaining your tools in the future. 

How the Fortinet security fabric helps solve these challenges

Missed opportunities

The problem of several disjointed point products employed in your security toolbox tends to result in a heavy learning curve for security staff and incomplete visibility across the enterprise. These challenges usually result in an overworked and less effective team, leading to missed opportunities for identifying risks, threats and vulnerabilities, decreasing overall security efficacy. The high level of orchestration and integration provided by the Fortinet security fabric not only with Fortinet products but also with the broader umbrella of third-party solutions supported by its ecosystem offers the following benefits:

• Unified reporting and analytics provide security teams with actionable insights and reduce the risk of missing opportunities for improving defenses.
• Threat intelligence is shared in real-time across Fortinet devices, such as FortiGate firewalls, Fortisandbox, FortiSIEM and Fortianalyzer, as well as third-party tools (e.g., SIEM platform vulnerability scanners).
• Automated, coordinated responses to security events, where different security tools can work together to contain, mitigate and respond to threats faster.

Future maintenance

The antidote for technical debt is "futureproofing" your tools. Easier said than done, right? To do this, you must make sure the following rules apply:

• Make sure they speak the same language: One of the most significant drawbacks to the point product approach is that when features are updated on one tool, they are not on another, so even if the tools were able to communicate at one point in time, advances in one area are not consistent across the board. Fortinet's unified operating system, a significant benefit to the security fabric, ensures that parts of the solution do not become antiquated while others are up to date. The solution moves forward as one "organism," easing maintenance overhead and keeping the solution current.
• Visibility across the board: The biggest enemy of security is a lack of visibility. Shining the light on your entire environment becomes more challenging with more tools. You must log in and tune in regularly. The Fortinet security fabric not only provides a unified view via Fortianalyzer (security alerts) and Fortimanager (physical topology), but Fortianalyzer can receive alerts from all your security tools under the Fortinet umbrella and correlate these, identifying security events that would otherwise not be found.
• Up-to-the-minute threat intelligence: Tools are only as good as the intelligence that feeds them, and a key component of the Fortinet security fabric is its integration into the fortiguard intelligence labs. As Fortiguard continuously monitors and detects threats, it allows the security fabric to identify and mitigate threats quickly, reducing the need for reactive measures to patch security holes, which tends to be a key contributor to technical debt.

Conclusion

In part one of the series, I used our analogy around the burrito shop to show what happens when too many resources are deployed to execute heavily overlapping tasks. Sure, it gets the job done, but at a cost. Several challenges are created. Missed opportunities exist when many resources are put to bear on overlapping tasks. In addition, future maintenance becomes more complex. It carries higher risk as the disparate tools speak different languages, complicating upgrades due to the lack of feature parity and the visibility gaps inherent with tools not designed to work together seamlessly. The Fortinet security fabric provides tools with clear boundaries for each function. In addition, feature functions across all security fabric tools are factored in with each FortiOS upgrade, delivering predictable results when upgrading and adding features. Finally, visibility is enhanced with the unified view provided by Fortimanage and Fortinanalyzer. The ability of the Fortinet solution to mitigate and solve these challenges gives your organization a leg up on "zapping" technical debt. For more information on integrating Fortinet into your environment, contact your WWT account executive.