3 Reasons Your Business Needs Security at the Edge

by Renny Shen on February 14, 2019

As a security professional, no one knows better than you that the attack surface is shifting and continues to expand across an ever-widening area. Our interconnected digital lives are wreaking havoc with the idea of “the perimeter.”

As digital attacks continue to grow in size and volume, and are increasingly targeted, knowing what defense posture you need to deploy to stay safe is being redefined right before your eyes. That’s why we need to retrain our focus to “the edge,” or edge network.

This is Where Security at the Edge Enters the Picture

The edge is the physical location where people connect with the networked digital world. It describes a topology where digital experiences are located closer to where they are created – and consumed closer to the end users.

Security at the edge is an approach to defending your business from security threats by deploying defense measures closer to the point of attack and as far away from your assets (your people, applications, or infrastructure) as possible.

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So why is this important?

3 Reasons You Need to Take Security to the Edge

Security at the edge enables you to:

Protect against attacks without compromising performance. Because the edge is at the nexus of physical topography and digital experience, there is maximum opportunity for elevated experiences based on proximity. You can protect applications wherever they are deployed — in your data center, in the cloud, or across multiple clouds — without sacrificing performance.
Defend against massive scale attacks. If history has taught us anything, we will continue to see the types of attacks we’ve seen in the recent past — only bigger. Take the memcached-fueled 1.35 Tbps attack in February 2018, for example. With an edge approach, you’ll be able to stop attacks using the scale of your vendor’s platform, calling on the ability to respond to all spikes of traffic — legitimate or malicious.
Manage a growing attack surface. The shifting perimeter is characterized by increasing enterprise cloud migration and digital business imperatives like a mobile first strategy and an increasingly API-focused back end. These trends reveal new application and infrastructure vulnerabilities. Security at the edge adapts to the “new” normal, meets threats closer to their source, and knocks them down before they penetrate your critical assets.

Given the growing threats posed by persistent attackers, it’s clear that the old perimeter-based understanding of security will not suffice. Instead, look to a security-at-the-edge approach that will greenlight your digital business transformation while keeping what you care about most dependably secure.

For a closer look at why you should consider an Intelligent Edge Security platform, including how it allows you and your security team to become a strategic partner instead of merely a cost center, read From the Core to the Edge: 7 Reasons You Need Security at the Edge.