New Products To Know
An array of new cybersecurity product releases during the first quarter made for a busy start to 2023 in the security industry. Cybersecurity companies that announced major new products and feature updates during the first three months of the year included vendors such as CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, Sophos and Microsoft.
Major themes of the cybersecurity product launches in Q1 included the use of AI and ML for improving cyberdefense, including the use of generative AI in a few cases. Key product segments that we tracked in the first quarter included cloud security, focused on protection of cloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; secure access service edge (SASE) and zero trust network access (ZTNA) for protecting hybrid and remote workforce access to applications; and extended detection and response (XDR) for correlating security data across tools and prioritizing threats.
[Related: 10 Cybersecurity Companies Making Moves: March 2023]
As Q1 of 2023 came to a close, details about what could be one of the largest cyberattacks in recent memory came to light, as researchers from security vendors including CrowdStrike and SentinelOne disclosed that communications app maker 3CX — as well as an untold number of its end customers — had become the victim of a software supply chain attackreminiscent of the widely felt SolarWinds breach of 2020. The attack underscored the need for cybersecurity products that can pinpoint legitimate attacks amid the countless alertsproduced by today’s threat detection tools, as well as the importance of protecting the software development process.
What follows are the key details on 15 new cybersecurity products to know from Q1 of 2023.
Palo Alto Networks Unveils SASE Update
Palo Alto Networks announced a forthcoming set of new features for its fast-growing secure access service edge platform, Prisma SASE, focused around AI and automation. The capabilities include AIOps that is natively integrated in order to bring greater automation to IT operations. The addition of AIOps — which uses AI-driven detection as well as predictive analytics — offers benefits such as proactive remediation of issues that could cause a service outage, according to the company. With proactive monitoring and diagnosing problems, Prisma SASE can now provide automated troubleshooting that reduces administrative overhead, said Kumar Ramachandran, senior vice president for SASE products at Palo Alto Networks.
“This is a huge release for us,” Ramachandran (pictured) told CRN in an interview. “Not only are we making massive advances in AI and ML, we’re also making the product more rapidly adoptable by customers.”
Other updates include several enhancements to SD-WAN, including improved visibility through the Prisma SD-WAN Command Center; integrated IoT security; and an on-premises controller for Prisma SD-WAN. With many buildings now having thousands of connected devices — from card readers to a variety of sensors — there’s a need to be able to automatically identify and classify the devices for security purposes, Ramachandran said. Prisma SASE can now do this while also making recommendations on how best to isolate devices in the event of a problem, he said. To do so, he said, “requires integration between SD-WAN and the security service, in our case Prisma Access. Being able to use ML in automatically classifying these devices is just very powerful. Otherwise, there’s such a large plethora of devices, administrators cannot manually identify and classify them.”
Check Point Adds Its Own SD-WAN
Check Point Software Technologies added a key piece to its SASE platform with the debut of its in-house SD-WAN offering in February. The SD-WAN “software blade” in the Check Point Quantum Gateways platform will enable both strong security as well as optimal performance for internet and network connections, according to the company.
Taking the time to develop its own SD-WAN in-house will ultimately pay off, thanks to the tight integration that Check Point is able to offer with the network gateway, Check Point co-founder and CEO Gil Shwed told CRN. “We worked on that for a long time,” Shwed said. “We really needed to make sure that the security and the [SD-WAN] actually work together very, very closely. We use the same engine to classify the traffic. We use all the same management to build that together. This is a really, really tight integration within the same gateway.”