Isolate and Liberate

How Web Isolation Is Setting the Stage for a New, Future-ready Approach to Security.

Imagine you’re an Olympic sprinter. The starting gun is about to go off when race officials announce a late change. You’ll need to hop a zig-zag pattern on one foot while still maintaining your original two-foot qualifying speed—or face a DQ.

Sound fantastical? That’s basically what security teams the world over have been told to do this year: Make radical, unprecedented operational changes happen safely and securely without breaking pace.

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Accommodating sudden rule changes has been a fact of life in 2020, necessary to secure a newly remote workforce and fast-track digital transformation projects. Initiatives that were once seen as important to staying competitive now appear vital to survival.

Different conditions have handed CSOs new challenges, but they’ve also opened the door to different ways of thinking.

Rather than return to default approaches, CSOs have a unique opportunity to question the default reliance on “detect and prevent” as a security strategy and ask if completely isolating users from internet-borne threats offers a better way forward.

The Promise of Web Isolation 

As a concept, isolation isn’t new. But the technology behind today’s solutions is new.

Traditional isolation technologies try to stop active internet content from being delivered to endpoints by display a harmless facsimile of the content on user devices instead.

These traditional solutions work in principle, but the user experience (UX) they deliver is slow and suboptimal.

At Menlo Security our patented ACR technology delivers isolation without those drawbacks. Users experience zero mouse lag, normal loading times, and don’t lose basic functionality like copy and paste. Our cloud-based platform isolates web content to tackle major threats like phishing, ransomware, and malvertising head-on while sustaining the experience users expect.

In the context of the post-pandemic world that’s coming, consider what adopting that type of platform could mean for a typical organization.

Protecting Remote Workers

It’s a fact that having remote workers makes cybersecurity harder to deliver. At least 70 percent of employees now use SaaS solutions and remote network access to connect devices to company networks.

Browser exploits can be a source of vulnerability, and they need to be regularly maintained. That can be difficult if users, devices, and IT teams are geographically separated.

To provide a solution that completely protects remote workers, Menlo Security has extended its Isolation Core™ to the Menlo Cloud Security Platform, which provides a separate and ubiquitous security layer in the cloud. All web and email traffic flows through it. Any malicious traffic is blocked, while all other traffic is isolated far from the user’s endpoint.

Enabling Digital Transformation

Shifting IT infrastructure and services to the cloud is fundamental to digital transformation. Still, it breaks the traditional hub-and-spoke network model that directs all internet traffic through a central security choke point.

The SaaS applications that remote workers use can change over time, altering traffic patterns. Rapid changes in traffic volume can overload the network security stack and impact user experience.

Isolation eliminates these concerns by delivering only a rendered version of live content to devices. That stops malware by separating cybercriminals from users’ devices—no matter what documents have been downloaded or which links have been clicked.

Home and Away

The pandemic and its aftermath are going to keep changing how we work and live for the foreseeable future, and cybersecurity has to keep up. Relying on traditional detect-and-respond strategies is loaded with risk, and is simply unsuited to companies that are moving critical systems to the cloud.

When more than 80 percent of CSOs say they’ve experienced a breach of some kind during 2020, cybersecurity has clearly reached an inflection point. Those ready to embrace change could emerge from the pandemic more secure than ever—but only if they’re willing to update their mindset and adopt a fresh attitude to isolation.

To learn more download Menlo Security’s latest White Paper: Parting the Clouds. Isolation for Greater Security.