At RSA 2018 in San Francisco Johnnie Konstantas, senior director, Enterprise Cybersecurity Group, Microsoft, Rob Lefferts, director, Microsoft and Sam George, director, Azure IoT, discussed the latest trends in the threat landscape and explored how defenders can reach outside their organizations to leverage pooled resources for better protection.
Konstantas said that easy marks are still under attack from adversaries, who continue to be attractive to ‘low-hanging fruit’ attack vectors.
What’s more, “the very definition of the network is changing,” she added, “we’re seeing what we once considered to be the network disappear. That means our thinking around security has to evolve with the shape of a new network which is about the intelligence cloud.”
The very state in which you have to protect is expanding meteorically, she added, and we can no longer identify the weak links in our network because “everything is a sensor, everything is connected. It becomes almost impossible to compute all the pathways into your critical data, which is why you can no longer do this alone – there is a heavy need for us to come together as an industry and provide integrated means by which you can expedite your responses.”
To do that, Lefferts explained how Microsoft is taking a cloud-based, communitive approach in a new platform to meet the security needs of consumers, highlighting four key areas of collaboration which are:
- Identity and access management
- Threat detection
- Information protection
- Security management
“We’re encouraging partners to work with us,” Lefferts said, and the results show “what we can do when we work together, taking advantage of assets and intelligence” to offer greater identity & access management and threat detection.
The key element in doing that is using cloud-based intelligence, and George said that is particularly important when it comes to security the IoT. “We see a tremendous amount of fragmentation in the IoT device space and security space,” he added, but “the cloud really comes into play in keeping IoT devices secure.”