Tag Archives: Gartner

Cloudflare recognized as a Visionary in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SASE Platforms

Post Syndicated from Abe Carryl original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-sase-gartner-magic-quadrant-2025/

We are thrilled to announce that Cloudflare has been named a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platforms1 report. We view this evaluation as a significant recognition of our strategy to help connect and secure workspace security and coffee shop networking through our unique connectivity cloud approach. You can read more about our position in the report here.

Since launching Cloudflare One, our SASE platform, we have delivered hundreds of features and capabilities from our lightweight branch connector and intuitive native Data Loss Prevention (DLP) service to our new secure infrastructure access tools. By operating the world’s most powerful, programmable network we’ve built an incredible foundation to deliver a comprehensive SASE platform. 

Today, we operate the world’s most expansive SASE network in order to deliver connectivity and security close to where users and applications are, anywhere in the world. We’ve developed our services from the ground up to be fully integrated and run on every server across our network, delivering a unified experience to our customers. And we enable these services with a unified control plane, enabling end-to-end visibility and control anywhere in the world. Tens of thousands of customers trust Cloudflare with their network and security infrastructure.

We’re thrilled with our inclusion in this report and are even more excited that we’re only just getting started. Building on this foundation, we’re investing to move even faster to solve problems for our customers.

What is SASE?

SASE (pronounced “sassy”) is an architectural model that delivers network connectivity and security functions, and delivers them through a single cloud platform and/or centralized policy control.

Given the extent of what organizations need for networking and security, not all SASE capabilities may be available from a single vendor. For example, the security-as-a-service model is sometimes consumed as a part of Security Service Edge (SSE).

The evolution of this architecture, where a vendor delivers key functionality across networking and security service in a single offering, is SASE. What’s important to note, however, is that convergence can mean many, many different things. For example, some vendors started with SSE capabilities and are building out infrastructure to support it. Some vendors are using public cloud for their infrastructure. Some are aggressively pursuing M&A to acquire functionality. These decisions have led to many problematic questions such as: how many interfaces do organizations need to manage their network and security needs? Why is security enforcement sometimes in the cloud and sometimes at the branch edge?

We believe that the market deserves more than a buffet of features. Convergence should be greater than the sum of the parts. The infrastructure/control plane/data plane for networking services should not be an independent entity from the security services. We believe that we are delivering SASE capabilities in a fundamentally different manner than the majority of vendors in the market: by building out the platform first, and layering services upon it.

We also believe that our efforts to focus on the underlying network delivers better solutions for simplifying your infrastructure, establishing control, and maintaining visibility to support branch connectivity, hybrid work, Zero Trust, and secure cloud access.

What is required for SASE and how is Cloudflare different?

The Cloudflare Global network is one of the largest, most well-connected networks in the world, spanning more than 330 cities in over 125 countries. We are not a new vendor entering a new market, but rather one that has been delivering services upon a mature platform that’s been tested under the most extreme circumstances over the past 15+ years.

Our unified platform, Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud, is built upon a set of principles across our infrastructure, our control plane, and our data plane, that guides everything we do:

Infrastructure: The infrastructure that we build must be everywhere our customers do business. Users, applications, and data are everywhere, and therefore we build ahead of our customer’s needs to ensure that they can connect anything to anywhere, quickly and reliably.

Control Plane: To stay on top of operations, organizations want a single user interface for monitoring activity and enforcing policies, with changes pushed out globally in seconds. In addition, our customers want APIs to extend management into automation and infrastructure-as-code tools. We help organizations cut down on the tool sprawl, doing away with the drudgery and complexity that affects even the most basic administrative tasks with conventional tech stacks. And we restore observability across activity (again by virtue of facilitating any-to-any connectivity) to help with operations with troubleshooting, forensics, and insights across the application landscape.

Data Plane: The data plane is where services are delivered, and we constantly deliver innovations in how users connect, consistently enforce inspection and policy, and deliver traffic to the intended location securely. These services are composable, meaning that new functionality can be enabled from the Control Plane, without the headaches of network downtime normally associated with appliance insertion.

How customers benefit from Cloudflare’s design principles 

These principles are crucial for delivering a superior, end-to-end user experience. Your SASE environment is (or will be) processing packets from users across the globe. Latency damages the user experience, in ways that are similar to how a smoothly running engine becomes unreliable and inefficient as internal components become dirty. Our design principles establish the north star to ensure that everything we do and everything we build does not add grit to the engine. This is important because we are seeing a lot of confusion (and some obfuscation) about how to deliver performant SASE services.

To understand how our principles apply towards the delivery of SASE services:

Connecting users to a data center (last mile latency): With traditional on-prem networking, one of the major sources of latency is getting the traffic to the security stack. Both hub & spoke and VPN focus on taking traffic (from sometimes distant locations) to one of the organization’s security enforcement points such as a perimeter firewall. With SASE, the objective is to deliver the security closer to the user, using one of the SASE provider’s data centers. Cloudflare’s global coverage delivers service to within 50ms of 95% of the world’s population. This is something unique to Cloudflare, in that other vendors seldom discuss how much data center coverage is needed to deliver sufficient last mile performance, or sometimes use confusing metrics about the latency within their data centers (see next section) to infer what organizations might expect with end-to-end latency.

Delivering key networking and security services (processing latency): SASE data centers must deliver networking and security, but not all cloud data centers are designed the same. Some implementations in the market separate the SASE edge (the point of presence) from the actual compute (the data center itself). Some have disguised their single-pass processing with a series of daisy-chained proxies, which requires inefficiently decoding packets multiple times (From L3 to L7 and back to L3) to perform different security functions. As a result, there’s often a delta between the performance of a configuration that offers low latency and the configuration with the security features that customers want enabled. Cloudflare delivers full compute in every data center. There is no “next-hop” to compute; instead, there are fungible compute resources to ensure the fastest interface-to-interface possible with all the security features (including TLS decryption) enabled.

Connecting from the SASE to applications (Internet exchanges, private backbone, optimized routing and peering): Many vendors optimize their data centers to focus on egress to the Internet/cloud, typically by participating in Internet exchanges along with a handful of peering relationships. In other words, their networks were not designed for traffic between data centers, which is a suboptimal design for branch-to-branch or branch-to-data-center traffic.

Cloudflare’s network operates a private backbone for traffic destined to another Cloudflare data center, and we are one of the largest participants in Internet exchanges in the world for traffic destined to the Internet/cloud. We are connected to over 13,000 public and private networks, plus our open peering policy provides extensive access for networks of different sizes to participate as well. But user experience isn’t determinable solely by the number of interconnections. Not all Internet exchanges are the same, and in many cases there are variables that affect the quality and reliability of any given connection. That’s why Cloudflare further optimizes the connection to the user’s ultimate destination, whether destined to a public or private network, to make path selection more intelligent than simply counting hops over routing protocols.

How customers adopt Cloudflare One

We’ve discussed how we do what we do. Now let’s discuss the services we deliver. While customers have a number of different requirements that are specific to their organization, we do see centers of gravity that drive their use cases:

Network modernization initiatives: Enterprise networks are in ways more complicated than they need to be. To make the enterprise network suitable for today’s hybrid workspace, many organizations are looking for ways to converge the on-prem and remote user experience. The adoption of the coffee shop networking architecture is driving many projects towards single-vendor SASE. By using Cloudflare Access, users can access applications securely with identity and device-based contextual controls. Organizations use Magic WAN for network connectivity across branch offices, headquarters, regional campuses and the data center.

Security modernization initiatives: Security teams with concerns about enforcing more granular security controls to access critical resources are making efforts to adopt Zero Trust. These initiatives drive security-focused SASE use cases, which can both reduce the attack surface and centralize enforcement of adaptive access policies. Security teams need to both enable access to private applications while also securing access to the Internet. Use Cloudflare Access to implement Zero Trust Network Access, which accelerates the deployment of protections by layering granular, user-specific access controls on top of the existing network topology. Use Cloudflare Gateway to enforce content filtering policies to protect access to the Internet. Use Cloudflare Email Security to stop phishing attacks and disrupt the business email compromise attack lifecycle. 

Transformation initiatives: Most organizations have legacy investments in both networking and security infrastructure, and are embarking upon a transformation across their business to support their future needs. Organizations that are transforming need to tackle both networking and security modernization. Cloudflare One addresses comprehensive transformation by delivering networking services through Cloudflare Magic WAN, Cloudflare Access to implement ZTNA, Cloudflare Gateway to protect users from Internet threats, Cloudflare CASB to secure SaaS, and more.

Building beyond SASE

We’re building new capabilities that extend beyond the traditional definition of SASE, all while leveraging our core Cloudflare network foundation. This includes addressing a broader spectrum of security concerns that organizations face, such as phishing and DDoS attacks.

We are expanding our networking capabilities to help organizations simplify and automate multi-cloud connectivity. As the boundaries between public and private networking blur, particularly with the widespread adoption of AI across various applications, customers are looking for a single set of controls for all their applications. This requires market-leading Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) services that natively support both positive and negative security models as part of SASE.

Furthermore, we are rapidly deploying Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in our data centers to power AI protections and support customer applications. As the only SASE platform that also serves as a leading Edge Distribution Platform with AI primitives, we are uniquely positioned to help customers to understand the latest AI capabilities and secure their users, networks, applications, and data with a security-first approach across the entire application lifecycle. We provide holistic support for the age of AI, and many leading Generative AI platforms rely on our network as critical infrastructure to operate. With their traffic and often code on our network, we enable the safeguard of customers’ AI usage.

We believe that these efforts will help the market evolve and address a broader range of customer concerns. We’re doing this incrementally, building integrated solutions on top of our foundation and accelerating our pace. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned for the year ahead in SASE.

Are you interested in Cloudflare One? Contact us to learn more about how we can help.

***

1Gartner, Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms, Analyst(s): Jonathan Forest, Neil MacDonald, Dale Koeppen, July 9, 2025

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Cloudflare named in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Post Syndicated from Abe Carryl original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-sse-gartner-magic-quadrant-2025/

For the third consecutive year, Gartner has named Cloudflare in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE) report. This analyst evaluation helps security and network leaders make informed choices about their long-term partners in digital transformation. We are excited to share that Cloudflare is one of only nine vendors recognized in this year’s report. You can read more about our position in the report here.

What’s more exciting is that we’re just getting started. Since 2018, starting with our Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) service Cloudflare Access, we’ve continued to push the boundaries of how quickly we can build and deliver a mature SSE platform. In that time, we’ve released multiple products each year, delivering hundreds of features across our platform. That’s not possible without our customers. Today, tens of thousands of customers have chosen to connect and protect their people, devices, applications, networks, and data with Cloudflare. They tell us our platform is faster and easier to deploy and provides a more consistent and reliable user experience, all on a more agile architecture for longer term modernization. We’ve made a commitment to those customers to continue to deliver innovative solutions with the velocity and resilience they have come to expect from us. If you want to join them on this journey today, contact us to discuss your own SSE journey. 

What is a Security Service Edge?

In general, a Security Service Edge (SSE) provides a helpful framing that gives teams guardrails as they adopt a Zero Trust architecture. The concept breaks down into a few typical buckets:

  • Zero Trust access control: Protect applications that hold sensitive data by creating least privilege rules that check for identity, device posture, and other signals on each and every request or connection.

  • Outbound filtering: Keep people and devices safe as they connect to the rest of the Internet by filtering and logging network traffic, DNS queries, and HTTP requests.

  • Secure SaaS usage: Analyze traffic to SaaS applications and scan the data sitting inside of SaaS applications for potential Shadow IT policy violations, misconfigurations, or data mishandling.

  • Data protection: Scan for data leaving your organization towards destinations that do not comply with your organization’s policies. Find data stored inside your organization, even in trusted tools, that should not be retained or that needs tighter access controls.

  • Employee experience: Monitor and improve the experience that your team members have when using tools and applications on the Internet or hosted inside your own organization.

The SSE space is a component of the larger Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market. You can think of the SSE capabilities as the security half of SASE, while the other half consists of the networking technologies that connect offices and data centers to each other along with everything that SSE connects. Some vendors only focus on the SSE side and rely on partners to connect customers to their security solutions. Other companies just provide the networking pieces. While today’s announcement highlights our SSE capabilities, Cloudflare offers both components as a unified SASE platform.

How does Cloudflare fit into the SSE space?

Cloudflare’s global network was built for this. We’ve developed a unified, programmable network in which every service runs in every data center, spanning more than 330 cities across the globe. Cloudflare operates within approximately 50 milliseconds of 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. That means that regardless of where your people, apps, and data are located, your Security Service Edge is not far away.

Our SSE services operate on the same infrastructure and locations that support many of the world’s most prominent Internet platforms. We’ve integrated proven strengths including the world’s fastest DNS resolver, our robust serverless compute platform, intelligence from our leading Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform and advanced global traffic routing capabilities developed as a result of proxying and protecting approximately 20% of websites. Our architecture ensures single-pass inspection, regardless of how customers connect. We also consistently hear that this performance is core to why customers chose Cloudflare. When customers choose Cloudflare, they’re choosing a unified, resilient platform built for the future.

By building our SSE platform on top of our own network, it puts Cloudflare in the driver’s seat. Whether that’s implementing best practices like IPv6, incorporating new technologies like WireGuard or MASQUE, or safeguarding against the future with post-quantum encryption, by building on our own network we’re able to react quickly as new Internet security standards mature.

Customers can rely on Cloudflare to solve a broad range of security problems represented by the SSE category. They can also just start with a single component. We know that an entire modernization journey can be an overwhelming prospect for any organization. While all the use cases below are built to work better together, we make it simple for teams to start by just solving one problem at a time.

Zero Trust access control

Traditional VPNs have been the backbone of enterprise remote access for decades. However, organizations are rapidly moving away from VPNs due to security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, and poor user experience. As businesses adopt Zero Trust principles, they expect modern solutions that:

  • Improve security posture by enforcing least privilege access and per-resource authorization, eliminating dependence on perimeter-based defenses

  • Enhance user experience with seamless, high-performance connectivity.

  • Reduce complexity and operational overhead by consolidating tools and automating access policies.

Cloudflare enables identity-driven, context-aware policies which replace the traditional castle-and-moat model that come with VPN-based solutions. Applications can be made available to employees as well as third parties through a completely clientless deployment. Policies can also be applied to the applications that sit outside your infrastructure to ensure a consistent experience across SaaS applications as well. 

By mid-2026, we plan to ship a number of new access control capabilities, including:

  • Identity provider (IdP) agnostic multi-factor authentication (MFA): Admins can enforce step-up MFA without having to direct a user back to an identity provider.

  • Just-in-time access controls: Review and approve timely access requests to sensitive resources. Users can request access via tools like Slack and Google Chat.

  • Browser-based RDP: Traditionally, vendors provide a limited number of PoPs which can support clientless RDP. With Cloudflare, customers get highly performant clientless RDP from the browser by connecting to any of Cloudflare’s data centers. This feature enables access to RDP targets without any software installed on the user’s machine.

Secure Web Gateway and DNS filtering

For decades, organizations relied on on-prem hardware firewalls to secure Internet access. Like applications, users have moved beyond the perimeter and cloud-based security services have become essential. Modern businesses expect solutions that:

  • Protect users across locations from malware, ransomware, and other Internet threats

  • Enforce those protections with real-time, comprehensive threat intelligence that adapts with emerging attack vectors

  • Reduce management complexity while maintaining granular policy control across the entire network

Cloudflare Gateway, our secure web gateway (SWG), inspects and filters DNS, network, HTTP, and egress traffic with consistent protections across the Internet and internal resources. Customers adopt our SWG to block threats across remote and office workers, enforce acceptable use policies, encrypt traffic, and block unauthorized SaaS and cloud destinations. In a single-pass architecture, all traffic is verified, filtered, and inspected without the performance penalties seen with hardware-based firewalls and proxies. Threat intelligence is derived from unique real-time visibility across our global network, including 4.3 trillion DNS queries per day, which powers AI-backed threat hunting models to identify, for example, new / newly seen domains before other vendors. 

Browser isolation capabilities are also natively built-in, enabling organizations to insulate users from threats online and protect data in applications with a seamless user experience. For example, isolating web browsing safeguards users from unknown threats, including zero-days, while isolating apps like AI tools can restrict oversharing of proprietary information.

Customers can get started with a variety of deployment methods including device agents, network locations, PAC files, or DNS over HTTPS (DoH) endpoints. Regardless of implementation, consistent policy enforcement and comprehensive logging is easily accessible through our dashboard, our SQL-based Log Explorer experience, or third-party tools via LogPush.

By mid-2026, we plan to ship a number of new filtering and traffic handling capabilities, including:

  • Deep packet inspection to apply filtering to non-standard ports for protocols like HTTP, SSH, and many others.

  • Filtering using Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs): Admins will no longer need to filter packets or egress connections based on destination IP addresses. They will be able to use the FQDN, application name, or destination category with the egress and network policy builders.

  • Identity + PAC files, providing identity-based filtering without having to install the device client.

Cloud firewall

Our comprehensive cloud firewall delivers “firewall as a service” protection that helps organizations manage traffic flows globally. All traffic passing through Cloudflare has firewall policies evaluated first, thus providing the first layer of defense, eliminating unnecessary/unwanted traffic before being further evaluated against security policies. The Cloudflare firewall applies configuration changes globally in seconds, thus providing immediate response to emerging needs. With Cloudflare’s network and data center capacity, you get virtually limitless firewall capacity, without the constraints of traditional hardware firewalls, making it a vital component of your Zero Trust and defense-in-depth architecture.

Inline and API-based CASB

SaaS applications relieve IT teams of the burden to host, maintain, and monitor the tools behind their business. However, they also create entirely new headaches for corresponding security teams. Modern organizations need solutions that:

  • Provide visibility into unauthorized application usage that creates compliance and security risks

  • Enable granular control over data flows within both sanctioned and unsanctioned applications

  • Automate discovery and remediation of security misconfigurations in approved SaaS tools

Any user in an enterprise now needs to connect to an application on the public Internet to do their work, and some users prefer to use their favorite application rather than the ones vetted and approved by the IT department. This kind of Shadow IT infrastructure can lead to surprise fees, compliance violations, and data loss.

Cloudflare offers comprehensive scanning and filtering to detect when team members are using unapproved tools. With a single click, administrators can block those tools outright or control how those applications can be used. If your marketing team needs to use Google Drive to collaborate with a vendor, you can quickly apply a rule that makes sure they can only download files and never upload. Alternatively, you can allow users to visit an application and read from it while blocking all text input. Cloudflare’s Shadow IT policies offer easy-to-deploy controls to help manage how your organization uses the Internet.

Beyond unsanctioned applications, even approved resources can cause trouble. Your organization might rely on Microsoft OneDrive for day-to-day work, but your compliance policies prohibit your HR department from storing files with employee Social Security numbers in the tool. Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) can routinely scan the SaaS applications your team relies on to detect improper usage, missing controls, or potential misconfiguration.

By mid-2026, we look forward to bringing our customers a slew of new capabilities designed to give teams even better visibility and control over their SaaS and cloud applications, including:

  • Robust remediation capabilities: Resolve detected issues right from the dashboard, both automatically and on-demand with a single click.

  • Advanced workflows: Configure automated behavior when new issues are detected, like custom alerting outputs and business justification prompts.

  • User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) & suspicious activity monitoring: Monitor live events across your SaaS apps and detect anomalous/suspicious activity that could indicate compromise.

Data security

Over the past year, CIOs and CISOs have consistently identified data protection as a top concern, particularly regarding artificial intelligence and large language models. As organizations increasingly rely on cloud services and AI tools, they require modern solutions that:

  • Protect sensitive information across all environments without hampering productivity

  • Provide visibility into how data flows through both internal and external systems

  • Enforce consistent security policies that adapt to evolving regulatory requirements

Cloudflare provides comprehensive visibility and control over data movement and data at rest. This helps organizations avoid the financial impact and reputational consequences of data loss and theft.

Our data security is an integral component of our SASE platform, providing granular control over how users interact with applications. This approach allows organizations to establish nuanced policies that safeguard sensitive information without completely blocking access to productivity-enhancing technologies.

We are introducing a number of exciting data protection capabilities by mid-2026, including AI-based DLP detections, delivering simple, innovative forensics, classifying sensitive data in the public cloud, and innovative, preventative cloud security controls. These features provide administrators with robust controls while maintaining the seamless performance and user experience that organizations expect from Cloudflare. 

Digital experience monitoring

Organizations today struggle with limited visibility into their users’ digital experiences. When performance or availability issues arise, internal support teams often lack the tools to determine whether problems originate in the first, middle, or last mile, resulting in multiple support tickets and delayed resolutions.

Cloudflare addresses this challenge with a comprehensive monitoring toolkit built on the same systems we use to manage our massive global network in-house. This solution empowers IT teams to:

  • Collect on-demand forensic and diagnostic information

  • Systematically gather telemetry data

  • Analyze patterns to anticipate issues before they impact productivity

Cloudflare provides unmatched insight into Internet outages and performance trends that affect your users. This intelligence allows administrators to refine their deployments and quickly identify whether issues are localized to their environment or part of broader global disruptions.

By mid-2026, we plan to ship a number of new digital experience monitoring capabilities, including:

  • Real user monitoring (RUM) that measures the performance of every user’s request.

  • Advanced monitoring for communication applications like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

  • Contextualizing user performance in terms of global Internet performance data.

Built for what’s next

Security Service Edge forms a critical component of modern enterprise protection, but organizations have modernization requirements across their network infrastructure. Cloudflare designed our capabilities with these needs in mind, because we deliver true convergence of both networking and security from our connectivity cloud.

Across the industry, we’ve seen many instances where vendors start with either networking or security as their primary focus, and acquire a vendor with an entirely different architecture to enter the SASE market. In such scenarios, there is no convergence with security and networking, because internal traffic is handled through different security controls than the cloud traffic.

Cloudflare delivers networking services using the same global data centers and backbone as our security components. Our composable architecture ensures all of our services are designed to work together, in any order. This means that your security and networking stays consistent and provides a common destination for your SASE journey, no matter where you start. 

We’re proud of the work that we’ve done to solve customer problems. Cloudflare continues to receive industry-wide recognition, earning additional positions in 2024 for our comprehensive suite of security solutions beyond SSE, built for the enterprise.

We believe this recognition underscores our position as a pioneering security and networking platform built for tomorrow’s challenges. When organizations choose Cloudflare, they gain more than just another SSE vendor; they’re establishing a partnership with a holistic platform capable of addressing their broader spectrum of requirements for both public and private resources, both today and in the future.

How does that impact customers?

Tens of thousands of organizations trust Cloudflare to secure their teams every day.  We talk to customers directly about that feedback, and they have helped us understand why CIOs and CISOs choose Cloudflare One. For some teams we offer a cost-efficient opportunity to consolidate point solutions. Others appreciate that the ease-of-use means that many practitioners have set up our solution before they even talk to our team. We know that speed matters when we are 46% faster than Zscaler, 56% faster than Netskope, and 10% faster than Palo Alto Networks.

What’s next?

We kicked off 2025 with a week focused on new security features that teams can begin deploying now. In the year ahead, look forward to announcements for our Secure Web Gateway, data protection capabilities, digital experience monitoring, and our inline and API CASB tools. And stay tuned for exciting innovations with AI-driven analytics and monitoring tools, too.

Our commitment in 2025 is the same as it was in 2024. We are going to continue to help your teams solve more security problems so that you can focus on your own mission.

Ready to hold us to that commitment? Cloudflare offers something unique among the players in this space — you can start using nearly every feature in our SSE platform right now at no cost. Teams of up to 50 users can adopt the solution for free to jumpstart a proof of concept. We believe that organizations of any size should be able to quickly and easily start their journey to modernize security.

Footnotes:

1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, Analyst(s): Charlie Winckless, Thomas Lintemuth, Dale Koeppen, Charanpal Bhogal, May 20, 2025

2 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Application Platforms, Analyst(s): Tigran Egiazarov, Mukul Saha, Anne Thomas, Steve Schwent, November 1, 2024

3 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms, Analyst(s): Max Taggett, Nikul Patel, Franz Hinner, Deepak Mishra, December 16, 2024

4 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE, Analyst(s): Andrew Lerner, Neil MacDonald, Jonathan Forest, Charlie Winckless, July 3, 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

AI and Resilience Take the Spotlight in 2025: Key Trends from Gartner® Cybersecurity Research

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/05/01/ai-and-resilience-take-the-spotlight-in-2025-key-trends-from-gartner-r-cybersecurity-research/

AI and Resilience Take the Spotlight in 2025: Key Trends from Gartner® Cybersecurity Research

Cybersecurity has never stood still — but in 2025, it’s not just evolving. It’s transforming.

Cybersecurity has entered a pivotal new phase. According to Gartner®, Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2025, “Security and risk management (SRM) leaders must enable business value and double down on embedding organizational, personal and team resilience to prove security program effectiveness in 2025.”*

That’s not just a shift in tactics — it’s a mandate to rethink how security supports transformation, agility, and sustainability in a world that’s constantly changing. At Rapid7, we’re offering complimentary access to this Gartner research to help you explore what’s next and how to prepare.

Here are three trends that stand out for leaders aiming to build a more resilient, AI-ready security program in 2025.

AI Is Here to Stay — and It’s Tactical Now

Security teams are moving beyond the fascination phase with GenAI. Now, it’s about real use cases with measurable benefits. Gartner states:

“SRM leaders are learning from AI transformation pilots and refining their processes based on initial success in taking a more tactical approach to AI integration.”*

Rather than chasing sweeping AI promises, forward-looking teams are prioritizing specific, achievable objectives. This approach is helping reduce risk and maintain credibility by “delivering more incremental security benefits than myopically striving for hype-driven seismic change.”*

From documentation assistance to incident triage and threat analysis, AI is no longer an experiment — it’s becoming a reliable tool for making overburdened teams more effective.

Resilience Is the New North Star

According to Gartner, we are seeing increasing recognition that a “zero-tolerance for failure” mindset has reached its peak in achieving sustainable risk buy-down and only increases the risk of security team burnout. At Rapid7, we see that In their place is a rising focus on resilience — not just in infrastructure, but in people, processes, and culture. It’s a hard pivot for many security programs built on prevention and perimeter defense, but it’s overdue.

From board-level priorities to frontline operations, security is now recognized as a business enabler. And enabling business requires adaptability. That means investing in burnout prevention, embedding resilience in security culture, and measuring success not just by how few incidents occur, but how effectively teams recover and evolve from them​.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, CISOs investing in cybersecurity-specific personal resilience programming will see 50% less burnout-related attrition than peers who don’t​.

That’s not just a wellness metric. It’s a business continuity strategy.

Less Tool Sprawl, More Platform Power

Most security teams today are managing dozens of tools. But consolidation without strategy is risky. Gartner notes that “SRM leaders are shifting focus to tool optimization rather than vendor consolidation,” urging leaders to strike a balance between integration and effectiveness.

“Organizations are seeking to strike the right balance between consolidation of commodity capabilities and purchase of separate, differentiated products to address niche requirements,”* Gartner explains. The message is clear: platform thinking matters — but only when it enhances outcomes, not complexity.

That’s why at Rapid7, we’ve built the Command platform to deliver comprehensive visibility and control, integrating detection, response, and exposure management into a unified experience backed by expert services.

The Takeaway: Secure Transformation Starts With Trust

If there’s one unifying message in Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2025, it’s this: transformation doesn’t have to come at the cost of control. AI doesn’t have to erode trust. Automation doesn’t have to sideline expertise. And resilience isn’t a soft goal — it’s the foundation of sustainable security.

By anchoring your program in clarity, resilience, and targeted innovation, you can move faster — and more confidently — than ever before.

Ready to see what’s ahead?

Access this complimentary Gartner research to explore trends shaping security in 2025 — and how to make them work for your team.

Gartner Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2025, Richard Addiscott, et al., 12 December 2024 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Three Takeaways from the Gartner® Report: How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/04/30/three-takeaways-from-the-gartner-r-report-how-to-grow-vulnerability-management-into-exposure-management/

Three Takeaways from the Gartner® Report: How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management

Security leaders today face a harsh reality: traditional vulnerability management isn’t enough. Threat actors are evolving, attack surfaces are expanding, and organizations need a more proactive approach to stay ahead of risk. Latest research from Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, highlights the need for security teams to move beyond simply tracking vulnerabilities and embrace a more comprehensive approach to exposure management.

At Rapid7, we are excited to offer complimentary access to this report and share our three key takeaways to help you modernize your security strategy.

Takeaway 1: Vulnerability Lists Aren’t Enough—You Need Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

Gartner states: “Creating prioritized lists of security vulnerabilities isn’t enough to cover all exposures or find actionable solutions. Security operations managers should go beyond vulnerability management and build a continuous threat exposure management program to more effectively scope and remediate exposures.”

CTEM shifts the focus from merely identifying vulnerabilities to understanding the full picture of organizational risk. It integrates asset visibility, business impact analysis, attack surface monitoring, and validation of security controls to help organizations assess and reduce their true exposure to threats.

Takeaway 2: Exposure Management Requires Business Context

One of the biggest challenges in vulnerability management today is that many security teams focus too much on discovering issues without evaluating their impact on the business. Gartner highlights the importance of integrating business context into security operations, stating that “adding a business context, such as asset value and impact of compromise, to exposure management activities can improve senior leadership engagement.”

By aligning security initiatives with business priorities, organizations can:

  • Focus on the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to critical operations
  • Improve communication with senior leadership and stakeholders
  • Justify security investments with real business impact

Takeaway 3: Attack Surface Visibility Must Keep Up With Digital Evolution

Modern attack surfaces extend far beyond on-premises IT. The rise of cloud applications, IoT, supply chain dependencies, and remote work environments has dramatically increased the number of potential entry points for attackers. Gartner emphasizes that “current approaches to attack surface visibility are not keeping up with the rapid pace of digital evolution. Organizations must quickly reduce exposure to make their public-facing assets less visible and accessible.”

This means security teams need to enhance their discovery processes to:

  • Continuously monitor both their internal and external attack surface
  • Identify misconfigurations, exposed assets, emerging threats, and weak access controls (e.g., credentials, risky users)
  • Implement proactive security measures to reduce overall exposure

How Rapid7 Aligns with Gartner Exposure Management Vision

At Rapid7, we believe in empowering security teams with the tools and insights they need to shift from reactive vulnerability management to proactive exposure management. Our Exposure Management solution helps organizations:

  • Gain real-time visibility into evolving attack surfaces
  • Prioritize threats based on business impact and exploitability
  • Continuously validate security controls through adversarial exposure testing

As threats continue to evolve, organizations must rethink how they approach vulnerability management. Gartner research provides a roadmap for security leaders looking to implement a comprehensive exposure management strategy.

Download the full Gartner report today to learn how you can modernize your security program and stay ahead of threats.

Garter, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, Michell Schneider, Jeremy D’Hoinne, Jonathan Nunez, Craig Lawson, 8 November 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Three Recommendations for Creating a Risk-Based Detection and Response Program

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/09/24/three-recommendations-for-creating-a-risk-based-detection-and-response-program/

Three Recommendations for Creating a Risk-Based Detection and Response Program

It should come as little surprise to most security professionals that keeping pace with the evolution of threat actors has become harder and harder. Maintaining visibility into the threat landscape and on top of external risk vectors is more than a matter of incorporating more point solutions. It takes a concerted risk-based approach, where the tools you choose are just one leg of the tripod.

In a report released earlier this summer, Gartner analysts offer three recommendations for fostering an environment of risk-based threat detection, investigation, and response that includes a deeper understanding of your organization’s risk profile by more than just the security team. Below are our three main takeaways from the Gartner® 3 Ways to Apply a Risk-Based Approach to Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response.

Takeaway 1: Better alignment and clearer objectives

The need to break silos between teams is a time-honored proposition that holds even more weight now than it ever has. Gartner suggests creating a quorum of business leaders from across the entire organization to be read into the state of your security and the needs going forward. Prioritize accurate and regular reporting of security metrics to build trust and create a consistent atmosphere of effective transparency. This group should be diverse, with decision makers and specialists from core departments. According to Gartner, the goal should be to:

“Allow the business to be part of the conversation and therefore champions of the capability, elevating the security program to a business function rather than an I&O underpinning.”

Takeaway 2: Integrated risk context

Giving incident responders as much information (and the right information) they need to quickly and efficiently respond to threats requires a complex layering of risk information that includes prioritization for the businesses key assets. Gartner recommends the use of cyber-risk information elements directly implemented into an IR program, layering in asset-based and business-risk information that gives responders the context they require to appropriately triage what can often be a large volume of data.

Gartner says:

“Incident responders should have as much information at their disposal as needed to be effective at finding a needle in a haystack.”

Takeaway 3: Fully enriched business context from jump

Too much information can often be as detrimental to a security team as too little. SecOps needs to have access to the right information in the most efficient way possible in order to find the signal through the noise. Gartner recommends reducing investigative delays through enriched information complete with business context (see, they are all connected). This transparency can be accomplished in part through SIEM, CAASM, and threat intelligence tools and a robust vulnerability management program, but it is worth noting that Gartner prioritizes providing the right information, not the most information; hence, utilizing the right tools.

All three of these recommendations combine to create a risk-based approach to detection, investigation, and response that Gartner says: “…organizations can expect to create measurable efficiency gains in threat detection and increase their ability to respond to threats in a timely manner.”

The Gartner® 3 Ways to Apply a Risk-Based Approach to Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response, report goes into even greater detail on the best approaches for implementing a risk-based approach to D&R.

Download the report here.

Gartner, 3 Ways to Apply a Risk-Based Approach to Threat Detection, Investigation and

Response, Jonathan Nunez ,  Pete Shoard , 10 July 2024.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the

U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The Growing Importance of Exposure Management: Our Key Insights from Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations, 2024

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/09/13/the-growing-importance-of-exposure-management-our-key-insights-from-gartner-r-hype-cycle-for-security-operations-2024/

The Growing Importance of Exposure Management: Our Key Insights from Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations, 2024

The Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations, 2024  was published in late July, and is an interesting look at the dynamic nature of both the threat landscape and the diverse range of technologies that security & risk management (SRM) professionals use to safeguard their organizations.

Understanding the Hype Cycle

Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities. Over 90 Hype Cycles are published per year. Hype Cycles provide a snapshot of the relative market penetration, maturity and benefit of innovations within a certain segment, such as a technology area or business market. This Hype Cycle helps security and risk management leaders strategize and deliver SecOps capability and functions.

What we think are key themes from this year’s Hype Cycle for SecOps

The 2024 Hype Cycle has seen some notable additions and consolidations, particularly around the rapidly-evolving Threat Exposure Management (TEM) market, as existing vulnerability assessment and management approaches mature to support the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework. In the report Gartner defines CTEM as “a program helping organizations to improve their maturity when they govern and operationalize the five recommended phases of exposure management: scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation and mobilization.’”

Three new profiles reflect this evolution:

  • Threat Exposure Management – This is intended to help organizations answer the question, “ow exposed are we?” It extends traditional approaches to vulnerability management to focus on risk reduction across a much wider potential attack surface, including cloud, SaaS applications and the third-party supply chain.

    Today,many organizations currently have a siloed approach to exposure management across many different domains — external, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing — and are struggling to keep up with the pace of environmental change.

    Gartner rates the potential benefit of Threat Exposure Management as ‘transformational’ and states that organizations should ‘employ proper governance and repeatability to make their threat exposure management programs continuous.’

  • Exposure assessment platforms (EAPs) – This is a new category with a ‘high’ benefit rating from Gartner. In the report, Gartner states that EAPs ‘continuously identify and prioritize exposures, such as vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, across a broad range of asset classes. They natively deliver or integrate with discovery capabilities, such as assessment tools that enumerate exposures like vulnerabilities and configuration issues, to increase visibility.’

    Gartner has removed both vulnerability assessment (VA) and vulnerability prioritization technologies (VPT) from this year’s Hype Cycle, stating that they have been ‘subsumed into exposure assessment platforms.’

    We believe that a potential benefit of EAPs is to provide better insights into high-risk exposures, which could allow organizations to prevent security incidents and breaches. They can also improve operational efficiency by providing centralized visibility of assets and exposures, supporting risk scoring reporting and trend analysis across the organization.

    Rapid7 is named as a Sample Vendor for EAP in this latest report.

  • Adversarial exposure validation – The third new category related to exposure management covers the validation pillar of a CTEM program. As noted in the report, “Adversarial exposure validation technologies offer offensive security technologies simulating threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures to validate the existence of exploitable exposures and test security control effectiveness. Within this profile, Gartner has consolidated breach attack simulation and autonomous penetration testing and red teaming. “
    Gartner recommends that security and risk leaders should ‘Integrate existing attack simulation and penetration testing scenarios into an adversarial exposure validation roadmap, as part of a shift from vulnerability management to a CTEM program.’

As well as these new categories, we also see movement among some of the existing technologies that can support CTEM initiatives – notably Cyber Asset Attack Surface Management (CAASM), External Attack Surface Management (EASM) and Digital Risk Protection Services (DRPS).

Both EASM and DRPS are in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ on this year’s Hype Cycle.  Gartner notes, “SRM leaders are reevaluating the value they’re getting from technologies in the trough, often having to reinforce their justification for budgets. For example:[…] Enterprises were unprepared to consume and operationalize service output (digital risk protection services, external attack surface management, ITDR).

CAASM has moved from ‘Innovation Trigger’ to the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’, reflecting the growing demand from enterprises to gain better visibility of their attack surfaces. CAASM helps provide more comprehensive visibility into assets by consolidating asset and exposure information into a holistic view. Noetic Cyber, a recent acquisition of Rapid7, is also a Sample Vendor for CAASM.

Rapid7’s vision for Exposure Management

Rapid7 recently announced the availability of Exposure Command and Surface Command, the first two solutions launched on the new Command Platform. Surface Command provides 360-degree visibility across the internal and external environment by bringing together EASM and CAASM in a single solution, enabling security teams to view and prioritize high-risk assets across their extended environments.

Building on the unparalleled visibility provided by Surface Command, Exposure Command expands traditional vulnerability management programs with insights and context from vulnerability, cloud and application security tools, establishing a single, consolidated platform for exposure management across the organization.

The Growing Importance of Exposure Management: Our Key Insights from Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations, 2024

This centralized point of exposure management allows security leaders to prioritize based on the overall risk to the business, understand complex attack paths across the cloud and on-premise environments, and surface the top areas teams need to focus on and while elevating the mitigation activities that would have the largest impact in reducing the overall risk score of your environment.

We believe that these new capabilities align well with the Gartner concept of exposure assessment platforms and the overall requirements of a threat exposure management program. To understand more about Rapid7’s approach to attack surface and exposure management, you can find out more here.

Gartner, Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2024, July 2024.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Our 4 Essential Strategy Takeaways from the Gartner® 2024 Report – How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/09/09/our-4-essential-strategy-takeaways-from-the-gartner-r-2024-report-how-to-prepare-for-ransomware-attacks/

Our 4 Essential Strategy Takeaways from the Gartner® 2024 Report – How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks

As ransomware threats continue to evolve, security and risk management leaders must stay ahead by adopting comprehensive strategies to protect their organizations. The 2024 Gartner report, “How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks”, provides critical insights into the latest tactics used by bad actors and offers practical solutions on how to fortify defenses.

Below, we highlight our four key strategy takeaways  from the report to help your organization prepare for and respond to ransomware attacks.

Adapt to the rise of extortionware

Traditional ransomware tactics are shifting towards extortionware—where attackers steal data and demand payment for its destruction rather than encrypting it. This growing threat emphasizes the need for robust data protection strategies.

According to Gartner: “Extortionware (encryption-free, data theft attack) is a growing tactic being used by bad actors.”

This evolution in tactics, which includes the emergence of 21 new ransomware groups in the first half of 2024, as noted in Rapid7’s Ransomware Radar Report, underscores the need for organizations to continuously update their defenses to counter new threats.

Actionable Strategy: Regularly update your threat models and security measures to account for new and emerging ransomware groups. Invest in advanced threat intelligence to stay informed about the latest tactics used by these criminal enterprises.

Strengthen your defenses with advanced detection technologies

This is increasingly important as ransomware attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. Rapid7’s research highlights a 23% increase in ransomware posts on leak sites during the first half of 2024, further emphasizing the growing threat landscape.

We believe Gartner reinforces the importance of detection, stating: “… identity threat detection and response (NDR) tools  collect indicators of compromise (IOCs) and events that alert you to anomalous behaviors that could indicate that an attack ‘may’ be underway.”

In addition to these detection tools, Gartner advises that a defense strategy should include Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPPs), EDR, and mobile threat defense (MTD) solutions.

For organizations lacking the necessary in-house expertise or resources, Gartner recommends supplementing EDR with managed services: “If internal teams don’t have the necessary skill set or bandwidth, supplement EDR with managed services (see Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services).”

Actionable strategy: Implement and regularly update behavioral-anomaly-based detection technologies. Ensure that your security operations center (SOC) is equipped to respond swiftly to any detected threats.

Rapid7’s Managed Threat Complete, which integrates core MDR functionality with transparency into operations and technology, ensures comprehensive visibility across endpoints, networks, users, and cloud infrastructure. We believe this aligns with the Gartner recommendation to supplement EDR with managed services to enhance your organization’s security posture (see the Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services).

Pay attention to vulnerable targets

While large organizations are often targeted, mid-sized companies are increasingly vulnerable to ransomware attacks. Rapid7’s findings support this, showing that companies with $5 million in annual revenue are being attacked up to five times more often than larger enterprises. These organizations are particularly attractive to attackers due to their valuable data and often less mature security defenses.

Actionable strategy: Mid-sized organizations should prioritize investing in mature cybersecurity defenses, particularly in endpoint protection, identity management, and regular security training for employees.

You can view the Rapid7 Ransomware Radar Report here.

Pay attention to vulnerable targets

While large organizations are often targeted, mid-sized companies are increasingly vulnerable to ransomware attacks. Rapid7’s findings support this, showing that companies with $5 million in annual revenue are being attacked up to five times more often than larger enterprises. These organizations are particularly attractive to attackers due to their valuable data and often less mature security defenses.

Actionable strategy: Mid-sized organizations should prioritize investing in mature cybersecurity defenses, particularly in endpoint protection, identity management, and regular security training for employees.

You can view the Rapid7 Ransomware Radar Report here.

Prepare with a comprehensive ransomware playbook

One of the key insights from the Gartner research is the critical importance of having a well-prepared incident  response plan. Given the increasingly sophisticated nature of ransomware groups—many of which now operate like full-fledged businesses with their own marketplaces and support networks—a detailed and rehearsed ransomware playbook is essential for any organization.

Gartner  states: “Develop an incident response plan with containment strategies that is augmented with a ransomware playbook.”

Actionable strategy: Develop and regularly update a ransomware playbook that includes clear roles, decision-making protocols, and communication plans. Conduct regular tabletop exercises to ensure your team is prepared to act swiftly and effectively.

Conclusion: fortify your defenses against ransomware

Ransomware is an ever-present threat that requires a proactive, multi-layered approach to defense. We feel the 2024 Gartner Report “How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks” provides essential strategies for preparing, detecting, and responding to these attacks. By implementing these recommendations, we believe your organization can better protect itself against the evolving tactics of cybercriminals.

Download the full Gartner report to explore detailed insights and recommendations for strengthening your ransomware defenses.

Gartner, Inc. How to Prepare for Ransomware Attacks. Paul Furtado. 16 April 2024.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the

U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

5 Key Insights from the Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/08/19/5-key-insights-from-the-gartner-r-market-guide-for-cloud-native-application-protection-platforms-cnapp/

5 Key Insights from the Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

As the cloud landscape continues to evolve, organizations face the growing challenge of securing their cloud-native applications. We feel the 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) provides invaluable insights into the latest trends and technologies that are reshaping how companies protect their digital assets. Below, we highlight five key takeaways from the report to help you navigate the ever-changing cloud security ecosystem.

Key takeaway 1: The expanding attack surface

The attack surface of cloud-native applications is widening, with attackers increasingly targeting runtime environments, networks, compute, storage, identities, and permissions. Misconfigurations and vulnerabilities in APIs and the software supply chain are also primary targets for cybercriminals.

According to Gartner: “CNAPP offerings bring together multiple disparate security and protection capabilities into a single platform focused on identifying and prioritizing excessive risk of the entire cloud-native application and its associated infrastructure.”

This comprehensive approach allows organizations to tackle threats head-on and maintain a secure cloud environment.

Key takeaway 2: Evolving developer responsibilities

Developers are taking on more responsibility for security as organizations embrace DevOps and shift left in their security practices. The need for advanced tools that address vulnerabilities and deploy infrastructure as code has become crucial.

The report highlights: “Proactively identifying and prioritizing risks during development, while providing developers with adequate context, is essential due to developers perceiving security as an obstacle.”

To support this shift, organizations should look for CNAPP solutions that integrate seamlessly with development processes, offering full life cycle visibility and protection.

Key takeaway 3: The importance of contextual risk analysis

Security teams must prioritize tasks and provide developers with the context needed to remediate issues quickly. Without this context, developers can become overwhelmed by alerts, leading to decreased productivity and potentially leaving vulnerabilities unaddressed.

The research suggests: “Security leaders should leverage CNAPP to strengthen defenses against attacks on network, compute, storage, identities, permissions, APIs, and the software supply chain, thereby mitigating potential risks and safeguarding critical assets.”

A strong CNAPP platform helps security teams understand the broader context of threats, making it easier to prioritize and address the most pressing issues.

Key takeaway 4: Integration and consolidation are key

The CNAPP market has experienced significant growth and consolidation, with a handful of vendors offering comprehensive platforms that integrate security across development and operations.

We believe the report emphasizes the benefits of consolidation: “CNAPP reduces operational complexity through consolidation of vendors, consoles, policies, and contracts, thereby reducing the chances of misconfiguration or mistakes.”

Organizations are moving toward unified solutions that offer consistent security policies across all application components, from code to containers to virtual machines. This integration not only simplifies management but also enhances security posture across cloud environments.

Key takeaway 5: Visualizing interconnected relationships

Understanding the relationships between various components of cloud-native applications is crucial for effective security. CNAPPs should leverage graph database technology to map these interconnected relationships, providing a visual representation of how resources, identities, and application components interact.

The report states: “A deep understanding of the relationships between an application’s elements (VMs, containers, service functions and storage), security posture, permissions, and connectivity, typically enabled by underlying graph database technology.”

This visualization is more than just a nice-to-have; it is becoming an expected feature. By using graph technology, CNAPP platforms can show potential paths for attackers to move laterally within an environment, enabling security teams to prioritize risks more effectively and understand the potential blast radius of a compromise. Rapid7’s latest Exposure Command, for example, incorporates this advanced graph visualization technology and attack path analysis, helping teams gain deeper insights into their security posture and enhance their threat mitigation strategies.

Conclusion: Navigating the cloud security landscape

Securing cloud-native applications requires a comprehensive and integrated approach that addresses risks throughout the development and production lifecycle. We feel the Gartner Market Guide for CNAPPs highlights the importance of selecting solutions that offer robust security features, seamless integration, and actionable insights to help organizations protect their digital assets effectively.

Download the full Gartner Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms to explore how CNAPPs can enhance your cloud security strategy and keep your applications safe from emerging threats.

Rapid7 Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM

Post Syndicated from Meaghan Buchanan original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/05/13/rapid7-recognized-in-the-2024-gartner-r-magic-quadrant-for-siem/

Command Your Attack Surface with a next-gen SIEM built for the Cloud First Era

Rapid7 Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM

Rapid7 is excited to share that we are named a Challenger for InsightIDR in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM. In a crowded and constantly changing space, this is our sixth time to be recognized in the report. While the Magic Quadrant offers a great snapshot of the current marketplace, we are always looking ahead to what teams will need to be successful in the next era of cybersecurity.

We believe that the future of SIEM will be defined by the ability to:

  1. Connect and synthesize expansive security telemetry as efficiently as possible
  2. Pinpoint the most critical and actionable insights with the scale and speed of AI
  3. Deliver the contextualized data, expert guidance, and automation to confidently take action against threats – wherever they start

We are proud to bring these elevated security outcomes to the thousands of customers across the globe who trust Rapid7 at the center of their SOC.

Actionable Visibility You Can Trust – From Endpoint to Cloud

As organizations’ attack surfaces continue to expand and security systems become more fragmented, teams are challenged to get reliable visibility and context to effectively monitor their environment, end-to-end. As your organization embraces digital transformation, adopts SaaS solutions, and/or fosters agile business development, you need security solutions that can grow with your business without the burden of infrastructure management or lagging scale.

InsightIDR is a cloud-native SIEM – purpose-built to support an organization’s scale with the speed of the cloud-first era. With flexible data ingestion – including our own lightweight, native endpoint agent, sensor, and collector as well as the ability to collect and parse diverse data from your wider ecosystem – customers are able to quickly synthesize their most critical telemetry, without the heavy management burdens of traditional SIEM technologies.

Many traditional SIEM approaches leave it all on the customer to figure out how to action their data once in their platform. This leaves resource-constrained teams on their heels and sorting through mounds of data without being able to pinpoint the insights that matter. InsightIDR’s flexible search modes boost both power-users’ and beginners’ ability to quickly turn data into actionable insights and leverage pre-built queries and dashboards as a jumping-off point for action. And with 13-months of readily searchable data logs by default, your data is always ready for you, whenever you need it.

Rapid7 Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM

AI-Driven Behavioral Detections to Pinpoint Today’s Advanced Threats

The current threat climate requires a high degree of vigilance and detections content curation to be able to keep pace with adversaries’ ever-growing arsenal of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This is one of the most challenging domains for security teams to master and carve out time for – and unfortunately most SIEMs have led with a logging-centric approach, putting the work of threat-intelligence gathering and detections engineering on the customer to parse.

From the beginning, InsightIDR pioneered the detections-centric SIEM, focused on pinpointing and eliminating real threats as quickly as possible. Our library contains over 8,000 detections, giving customers complete coverage across all stages of the MITRE ATT&CK. Our detections engineering experts are constantly curating threat intelligence – including unique raw intelligence from our renowned Rapid7 Open Source Community (including Metasploit, the #1 pentesting tool in the world, Velociraptor digital forensics and incident response framework, and AttackKB vulnerability database) – to ensure customers have coverage against emergent threats (and because our platform is SaaS-delivered, customers immediately receive new detections content ).

Rapid7 holds 56 patents across proprietary analytics frameworks and AI, which contribute to our layered detections strategy. AI-powered attacker and user behavioral analytics detect stealthy attacker behavior and unknown threats that can often go undetected, and complement known indicators of compromise (IOCs) for total coverage. This is the same detections library that our Rapid7 MDR team leverages, so our SIEM customers have high efficacy, low-noise detections they can trust out of the gate.

Rapid7 Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM

Response Built for Cloud and Distributed Environments

In the critical moments of an attack, the last thing a security analyst wants to be doing is hopping tabs between different solutions to get the full picture. But security solution sprawl has forced too many SOCs to be tied up being systems integrators vs. being able to focus on actual security work.

InsightIDR’s investigation views eliminate tab-hopping and disparate alert trails. When an alert is fired, customers see a consolidated timeline view of an attack, lateral movement, impacted users and assets, and related CVEs in a single view. Detailed evidence and intelligence, ATT&CK mapping, and vetted recommendations provide all relevant detail at the customer’s fingertips – so even your most junior analyst can respond like an expert, every time. Customers can also pivot from these investigation views into the Velociraptor DFIR framework to more broadly query distributed endpoint fleets to understand the full scope of an attack and avoid repeat occurrences.

One of the biggest challenges of today’s landscape is navigating response to complex cloud environments. Our simplified cloud threat alert view ensures SOC teams can confidently triage cloud provider alerts – like those from GuardDuty – with a purpose-built alert framework that parses out critical alert summaries, impacted resources, queries, and recommends responses to prioritize and act as quickly as possible on threats across cloud workloads. Regardless of where threats begin, with InsightIDR your team is covered and always knows what to do next.

Let Rapid7 Help You Take Command of Your Attack Surface

The complexities of today’s modern attack surface can be daunting, and are too often compounded by disparate solutions or legacy approaches that can make things worse. Rapid7’s integrated platform approach synthesizes your security data ecosystem to deliver unified exposure management and detection and response that maximizes efficiency and security outcomes. Thank you to our customers and partners who trust Rapid7 as their security consolidation partner of choice, and have contributed to recognitions like this Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM.

Learn more:

  • Read the report
  • Please register for our cybersecurity event on May 21st to learn how Rapid7 can help you build cyber resilience and take command of your attack surface.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant and Peer Insights are a registered trademark, of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences with the vendors listed on the platform, should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

Cloudflare named in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-sse-gartner-magic-quadrant-2024


Gartner has once again named Cloudflare to the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE) report1. We are excited to share that Cloudflare is one of only ten vendors recognized in this report. For the second year in a row, we are recognized for our ability to execute and the completeness of our vision. You can read more about our position in the report here.

Last year, we became the only new vendor named in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SSE. We did so in the shortest amount of time as measured by the date since our first product launched. We also made a commitment to our customers at that time that we would only build faster. We are happy to report back on the impact that has had on customers and the Gartner recognition of their feedback.

Cloudflare can bring capabilities to market quicker, and with greater cost efficiency, than competitors thanks to the investments we have made in our global network over the last 14 years. We believe we were able to become the only new vendor in 2023 by combining existing advantages like our robust, multi-use global proxy, our lightning-fast DNS resolver, our serverless compute platform, and our ability to reliably route and accelerate traffic around the world.

We believe we advanced further in the SSE market over the last year by building on the strength of that network as larger customers adopted Cloudflare One. We took the ability of our Web Application Firewall (WAF) to scan for attacks without compromising speed and applied that to our now comprehensive Data Loss Prevention (DLP) approach. We repurposed the tools that we use to measure our own network and delivered an increasingly mature Digital Experience Monitoring (DEX) suite for administrators. And we extended our Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) toolset to scan more applications for new types of data.

We are grateful to the customers who have trusted us on this journey so far, and we are especially proud of our customer reviews in the Gartner® Peer Insights™ panel as those customers report back on their experience with Cloudflare One. The feedback has been so consistently positive that Gartner named Cloudflare a Customers’ Choice2 for 2024. We are going to make the same commitment to you today that we made in 2023: Cloudflare will only build faster as we continue to build out the industry’s best SSE platform.

What is a Security Service Edge?

A Security Service Edge (SSE) “secures access to the web, cloud services and private applications. Capabilities include access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable-use control enforced by network-based and API-based integration. SSE is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service, and may include on-premises or agent-based components.”3

The SSE solutions in the market began to take shape as companies dealt with users, devices, and data leaving their security perimeters at scale. In previous generations, teams could keep their organization safe by hiding from the rest of the world behind a figurative castle-and-moat. The firewalls that protected their devices and data sat inside the physical walls of their space. The applications their users needed to reach sat on the same intranet. When users occasionally left the office they dealt with the hassle of backhauling their traffic through a legacy virtual private network (VPN) client.

This concept started to fall apart when applications left the building. SaaS applications offered a cheaper, easier alternative to self-hosting your resources. The cost and time savings drove IT departments to migrate and security teams had to play catch up as all of their most sensitive data also migrated.

At the same time, users began working away from the office more often. The rarely used VPN infrastructure inside an office suddenly struggled to stay afloat with the new demands from more users connecting to more of the Internet.

As a result, the band-aid boxes in an organization failed — in some cases slowly and in other situations all at once. SSE vendors offer a cloud-based answer. SSE providers operate their own security services from their own data centers or on a public cloud platform. Like the SaaS applications that drove the first wave of migration, these SSE services are maintained by the vendor and scale in a way that offers budget savings. The end user experience improves by avoiding the backhaul and security administrators can more easily build smarter, safer policies to defend their team.

The SSE space covers a broad category. If you ask five security teams what an SSE or Zero Trust solution is, you’ll probably get six answers. In general, SSE provides a helpful framing that gives teams guard rails as they try to adopt a Zero Trust architecture. The concept breaks down into a few typical buckets:

  • Zero Trust Access Control: protect applications that hold sensitive data by creating least-privilege rules that check for identity and other contextual signals on each and every request or connection.
  • Outbound Filtering: keep users and devices safe as they connect to the rest of the Internet by filtering and logging DNS queries, HTTP requests, or even network-level traffic.
  • Secure SaaS Usage: analyze traffic to SaaS applications and scan the data sitting inside of SaaS applications for potential Shadow IT policy violations, misconfigurations, or data mishandling.
  • Data Protection: scan for data leaving your organization or for destinations that do not comply with your organization’s policies. Find data stored inside your organization, even in trusted tools, that should not be retained or needs tighter access controls.
  • Employee Experience: monitor and improve the experience that your team members have when using tools and applications on the Internet or hosted inside your own organization.

The SSE space is a component of the larger Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market. You can think of the SSE capabilities as the security half of SASE while the other half consists of the networking technologies that connect users, offices, applications, and data centers. Some vendors only focus on the SSE side and rely on partners to connect customers to their security solutions. Other companies just provide the networking pieces. While today’s announcement highlights our SSE capabilities, Cloudflare offers both components as a comprehensive, single-vendor SASE provider.

How does Cloudflare One fit into the SSE space?

Customers can rely on Cloudflare to solve the entire range of security problems represented by the SSE category. They also can just start with a single component. We know that an entire “digital transformation” can be an overwhelming prospect for any organization. While all the use cases below work better together, we make it simple for teams to start by just solving one problem at a time.

Zero Trust access control

Most organizations begin that problem-solving journey by attacking their virtual private network (VPN). In many cases, a legacy VPN operates in a model where anyone on that private network is trusted by default to access anything else. The applications and data sitting on that network become vulnerable to any user who can connect. Augmenting or replacing legacy VPNs is one of the leading Zero Trust use cases we see customers adopting, in part to eliminate pains related to the ongoing series of high-impact VPN vulnerabilities in on-premises firewalls and gateways.

Cloudflare provides teams with the ability to build Zero Trust rules that replace the security model of a traditional VPN with one that evaluates every request and connection for trust signals like identity, device posture, location, and multifactor authentication method. Through Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), administrators can make applications available to employees and third-party contractors through a fully clientless option that makes traditional tools feel just like SaaS applications. Teams that need more of a private network can still build one on Cloudflare that supports arbitrary TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic, including bidirectional traffic, while still enforcing Zero Trust rules.

Cloudflare One can also apply these rules to the applications that sit outside your infrastructure. You can deploy Cloudflare’s identity proxy to enforce consistent and granular policies that determine how team members log into their SaaS applications, as well.

DNS filtering and Secure Web Gateway capabilities

Cloudflare operates the world’s fastest DNS resolver, helping users connect safely to the Internet whether they are working from a coffee shop or operating inside some of the world’s largest networks.

Beyond just DNS filtering, Cloudflare also provides organizations with a comprehensive Secure Web Gateway (SWG) that inspects the HTTP traffic leaving a device or entire network. Cloudflare filters each request for dangerous destinations or potentially malicious downloads. Besides SSE use cases, Cloudflare operates one of the largest forward proxies in the world for Internet privacy used by Apple iCloud Private Relay, Microsoft Edge Secure Network, and beyond.

You can also mix-and-match how you want to send traffic to Cloudflare. Your team can decide to send all traffic from every mobile device or just plug in your office or data center network to Cloudflare’s network. Each request or DNS query is logged and made available for review in our dashboard or can be exported to a 3rd party logging solution.

In-line and at-rest CASB

SaaS applications relieve IT teams of the burden to host, maintain, and monitor the tools behind their business. They also create entirely new headaches for corresponding security teams.

Any user in an enterprise now needs to connect to an application on the public Internet to do their work, and some users prefer to use their favorite application rather than the ones vetted and approved by the IT department. This kind of Shadow IT infrastructure can lead to surprise fees, compliance violations, and data loss.

Cloudflare offers comprehensive scanning and filtering to detect when team members are using unapproved tools. With a single click, administrators can block those tools outright or control how those applications can be used. If your marketing team needs to use Google Drive to collaborate with a vendor, you can apply a quick rule that makes sure they can only download files and never upload. Alternatively, allow users to visit an application and read from it while blocking all text input. Cloudflare’s Shadow IT policies offer easy-to-deploy controls over how your organization uses the Internet.

Beyond unsanctioned applications, even approved resources can cause trouble. Your organization might rely on Microsoft OneDrive for day-to-day work, but your compliance policies prohibit your HR department from storing files with employee Social Security numbers in the tool. Cloudflare’s Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) can routinely scan the SaaS applications your team relies on to detect improper usage, missing controls, or potential misconfiguration.

Digital Experience Monitoring

Enterprise users have consumer expectations about how they connect to the Internet. When they encounter delays or latency, they turn to IT help desks to complain. Those complaints only get louder when help desks lack the proper tools to granularly understand or solve the issues.

Cloudflare One provides teams with a Digital Experience Monitoring toolkit that we built based on the tools we have used for years inside of Cloudflare to monitor our own global network. Administrators can measure global, regional, or individual latency to applications on the Internet. IT teams can open our dashboard to troubleshoot connectivity issues with single users. The same capabilities we use to proxy approximately 20% of the web are now available to teams of any size, so they can help their users.

Data security

The most pressing concern we have heard from CIOs and CISOs over the last year is the fear around data protection. Whether data loss is malicious or accidental, the consequences can erode customer trust and create penalties for the business.

We also hear that deploying any sort of effective data security is just plain hard. Customers tell us anecdotes about expensive point solutions they purchased with the intention to implement them quickly and keep data safe, that ultimately just didn’t work or slowed down their teams to the point that they became shelfware.

We have spent the last year aggressively improving our solution to that problem as the single largest focus area of investment in the Cloudflare One team. Our data security portfolio, including data loss prevention (DLP), can now scan for data leaving your organization, as well as data stored inside your SaaS applications, and prevent loss based on exact data matches that you provide or through fuzzier patterns. Teams can apply optical character recognition (OCR) to find potential loss in images, scan for public cloud keys in a single click, and software companies can rely on predefined ML-based source code detections.

Data security will continue to be our largest area of focus in Cloudflare One over the next year. We are excited to continue to deliver an SSE platform that gives administrators comprehensive control without interrupting or slowing down their users.

Beyond the SSE

The scope of an SSE solution captures a wide range of the security problems that plague enterprises. We also know that issues beyond that definition can compromise a team. In addition to offering an industry-leading SSE platform, Cloudflare gives your team a full range of tools to protect your organization, to connect your team, and to secure all of your applications.

IT compromise tends to start with email. The majority of attacks begin with some kind of multi-channel phishing campaign or social engineering attack sent to the largest hole in any organization’s perimeter: their employees’ email inboxes. We believe that you should be protected from that too, even before the layers of our SSE platform kick in to catch malicious links or files from those emails, so Cloudflare One also features best-in-class cloud email security. The capabilities just work with the rest of Cloudflare One to help stop all phishing channels — inbox (cloud email security), social media (SWG), SMS (ZTNA together with hard keys), and cloud collaboration (CASB). For example, you can allow team members to still click on potentially malicious links in an email while forcing those destinations to load in an isolated browser that is transparent to the user.

Most SSE solutions stop there, though, and only solve the security challenge. Team members, devices, offices, and data centers still need to connect in a way that is performant and highly available. Other SSE vendors partner with networking providers to solve that challenge while adding extra hops and latency. Cloudflare customers don’t have to compromise. Cloudflare One offers a complete WAN connectivity solution delivered in the same data centers as our security components. Organizations can rely on a single vendor to solve how they connect and how they do so securely. No extra hops or invoices needed.

We also know that security problems do not distinguish between what happens inside your enterprise and the applications you make available to the rest of the world. You can secure and accelerate the applications that you build to serve your own customers through Cloudflare, as well. Analysts have also recognized Cloudflare’s Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform, which protects some of the world’s largest Internet destinations.

How does that impact customers?

Tens of thousands of organizations trust Cloudflare One to secure their teams every day. And they love it. Over 200 enterprises have reviewed Cloudflare’s Zero Trust platform as part of Gartner® Peer Insights™. As mentioned previously, the feedback has been so consistently positive that Gartner named Cloudflare a Customers’ Choice for 2024.

We talk to customers directly about that feedback, and they have helped us understand why CIOs and CISOs choose Cloudflare One. For some teams, we offer a cost-efficient opportunity to consolidate point solutions. Others appreciate that our ease-of-use means that many practitioners have set up our platform before they even talk to our team. We also hear that speed matters to ensure a slick end user experience when we are 46% faster than Zscaler, 56% faster than Netskope, and 10% faster than Palo Alto Networks.

What’s next?

We kicked off 2024 with a week focused on new security features that teams can begin deploying now. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, you can expect additional investment as we add depth to our Secure Web Gateway product. We also have work underway to make our industry-leading access control features even easier to use. Our largest focus areas will include our data protection platform, digital experience monitoring, and our in-line and at-rest CASB tools. And stay tuned for an overhaul to how we surface analytics and help teams meet compliance needs, too.

Our commitment to our customers in 2024 is the same as it was in 2023. We are going to continue to help your teams solve more security problems so that you can focus on your own mission.

Ready to hold us to that commitment? Cloudflare offers something unique among the leaders in this space — you can start using nearly every feature in Cloudflare One right now at no cost. Teams of up to 50 users can adopt our platform for free, whether for their small team or as part of a larger enterprise proof of concept. We believe that organizations of any size should be able to start their journey to deploy industry-leading security.

***

1Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, By Charlie Winckless, Thomas Lintemuth, Dale Koeppen, April 15, 2024
2Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Zero Trust Network Access, By Peer Contributors, 30 January 2024
3https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/security-service-edge-sse

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, MAGIC QUADRANT and PEER INSIGHTS are registered trademarks and The GARTNER PEER INSIGHTS CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner® Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its a iliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

5 Insights from the Latest Cybersecurity Trends Research

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/02/07/5-insights-from-the-latest-cybersecurity-trends-research/

5 Insights from the Latest Cybersecurity Trends Research

Rapid7 is committed to promoting research that identifies the latest cybersecurity trends so that  organizations can leverage these insights and create programs that make sense for the modern SOC. To that end, we’ve singled out five quick insights security professionals and stakeholders should consider when looking ahead. These findings are based on Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2024, a new research report from Gartner®.

Organizations Will Focus on Improving Resilience

As cloud continues to be adopted at a frenzied pace across organizations large, small, and everything in between, it’s critical to maintain organizational resiliency as attack surfaces expand and security becomes more urgent than ever. Indeed, the research notes that: “Improving organizational resilience has become a primary driver of security investments for several interconnected reasons:

  • “Digital ecosystems continue to sprawl, due to increasing cloud adoption.
  • Organizations are entrenching hybrid work arrangements.
  • The threat environment continues to evolve as emerging capabilities also embolden attackers.”

Continuous Threat Exposure Management Programs Will Take Off

Organizational attack surfaces have expanded for many reasons: the adoption of SaaS, remote work, custom application development, and more. All of these changes are efficiency drivers for businesses, but can also become liabilities rife with vulnerabilities. As organizations put more products and policies into place –  especially from multiple vendors – it can become more difficult to manage this new attack surface at scale.

The research stipulates that, in order to try and solve this issue, “security and risk management (SRM) leaders have introduced pilot processes that govern the volume and importance of threat exposures and the impact of dealing with them with continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) programs.” Short-term remediations can only go so far; the game is accelerating and long-term solutions must be put into place.

Generative AI Will Inspire Long-Term-Yet-Cautious Hope

Security organizations are embracing generative AI (GenAI) to help gain visibility across hybrid attack surfaces, spot threats fast, and automatically prioritize risk signals. In other sectors, unmanaged and uncontrolled uses of GenAI need reigning in before they can cause real societal damage with things like deepfakes, misinformation, and copyright infringement.

The research states that “the most notable issues were the use of confidential data in third-party GenAI applications and the copyright infringement and brand damage that could result from the use of unvetted generated content.” As AI companies continue to release new products that are more readily customizable by developers, laws and security policies will need to be put into place to curtail this potential third-party threat.

The C-Suite Communications Gap Will Narrow

With clearer outcome-driven metrics (ODMs) comes the ability to more easily convince the boardroom that direct investment in a cybersecurity initiative is imperative. Indeed, CISOs and other key security personnel and stakeholders have for years been running up against budgetary pushback that all too often leads to a porous attack surface as well as the inability to properly respond or prepare.

According to the research, “the 2023 Gartner Evolution of Cybersecurity Leader Survey asked chief information security officers (CISOs) the following question: ‘What has been the impact of changing business objectives on your cybersecurity strategy?’ In response, 60% said there had been some impact or a major impact.” When goals and/or key performance indicators (KPIs) shift, the security organization must be able to readily communicate where potential risk could lie in the changed environment.

ODMs can create a clearer path for security. From the report:

  • “Explain material cyber incidents to executives and guide specific investments to remediate them.
  • Support transparency to educate executives, lines of business and corporate functions about inappropriate or cavalier risk acceptance.
  • Expose matrixed management problems, such as the role the IT team plays in patching problems for which the security organization is typically held accountable.”

Cybersecurity Reskilling Will Help to Future-Proof

There is a continuing cybersecurity talent gap and, at the same time, there seems to be a shift in the types of skills practitioners need to bring to the job. Think of the implications this “moving target” has on both security organizations and people strategy teams tasked with scouring the marketplace for this magical unicorn.

The report details how, “in the U.S. alone, there are only enough qualified cybersecurity professionals to meet 70% of current demand – an all-time low over the past decade.” A plethora of trends are leading to this current disparity, including: accelerated cloud adoption, the emergence of GenAI, threat-landscape expansion, and vendor consolidation.

Greater business acumen as well as AI ethics and human psychology are just a few of the soft skills that will come to have greater prominence in job descriptions of security talent. Indeed, this may signal a stronger coming partnership between talent acquisition teams and security teams so that all parties involved can be sure that the right talent is recruited in the best way possible.

Read the report here.

Gartner, Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2024, Richard Addiscott, Jeremy D’Hoinne, et al., 2 January 2024

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

4 Questions for CISOs to Reduce Threat Exposure Risk

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/01/11/4-questions-for-cisos-to-reduce-threat-exposure-risk/

4 Questions for CISOs to Reduce Threat Exposure Risk

In an ongoing effort to help security organizations gain greater visibility into threat exposure risk, we have determined four key questions every CISO should be considering based on our understanding of the recommendations of a new report from Gartner®. The report, 2024 Strategic Roadmap for Managing Threat Exposure, can help CISOs and other top executives steer away from risk by analyzing their attack surfaces for gaps.

Question #1: What Do You Already Know?

What are the business-driven events that have already been or are currently being scoped and planned for? In analyzing threat exposure for specific events along the course of the year, a security organization will have the power to better tailor their risk mitigation approaches.

“It’s crucial to scope risk in relation to threat exposure, as this is one of the key outputs that will benefit the wider business. To do so, senior leaders must understand the exposure facing the organization, in direct relation to the impact that an exploitation of said exposure would have. Together, with this information, executives can make informed decisions to either remediate, mitigate or accept the perceived risks. Without impact context, the exposures may be addressed in isolation, leading to uncoordinated fixes relegated to individual departments exacerbating the current problems associated with most vulnerability management programs.” says the Gartner report.

Post-risk scoping, it’s a good idea to then consider if there are any measures that can be taken to better protect certain business-driven events if they have been found to have a greater chance of threat-actor exploitability.

Question #2: How Visible Are Your Critical Systems?

It is also incredibly valuable to take inventory of the most critical and exposed systems in the network, along with each system’s level of visibility and its location. Having a thorough catalog of the points that are or could be the most vulnerable is a must. Just because an exploitable asset might not be considered a remediation priority, there is always the possibility it could be exploited down the line.

Within the context of the report, Gartner details a visibility framework that can aid with vulnerability prioritization:

“Coupled with accessibility is the visibility of the exploitable service, port, or asset. These technologies implement configuration to ensure that details of exploitable elements are not revealed to potential attackers, but not directly removing the possibility of their exploitation.”

Therefore, it becomes necessary to leverage technologies that can provide insights into the visibility of an asset so that – if there is currently a low likelihood of exploitability – remediation efforts can be focused elsewhere and efficiences can be gained within the security organization.

Question #3: Who “Owns” IT Systems?

Identifying who is responsible for the deployment and management of critical IT systems is key if the security organization is to get interdepartmental buy-in for an effective plan to manage threat exposure. Sometimes there isn’t just one person responsible for a certain aspect of network management, which is important to keep in mind as efforts to mitigate threat exposure are built out.

Security personnel, as with so many business operations in which they take part, also must keep in mind that there could be pushback or slow buy-in to a plan that is perceived to lack context. To this point, the research states:

“Without impact context, the exposures may be addressed in isolation, leading to uncoordinated fixes relegated to individual departments exacerbating the current problems associated with most vulnerability management programs.”

Question #4: Who is Responsible for Risk?

Potential friction could also lie in the effort to convince a system owner that there is real action required – and that it could upend that team’s workflow. Effective communication will be imperative here, as will the ability to provide the visibility needed to quickly convince stakeholders that action is, indeed, needed and worth the potential interruption. The report drives home the need for allying with those responsible for risk decisions:

“From the perspective of the organization’s business risk owner, it’s important to recognize that the security team’s role is to support risk management in such a way that the owner can make informed data-driven decisions.”

The CISO Says It All

It will ultimately be up to the CISO to manage and connect separate plans to both limit and eliminate threat exposure along attack surfaces. Through this effort, the CISO can demonstrate the benefits of implementing platforms to manage the growing risk of threat exposure. They’ll also be able to prove the worth of the security operations center (SOC) as both key partners in the effort to keep business secure.

We’re pleased to continually offer leading research to help you gain clarity into managing the risk of threat exposure. Read the Gartner report to better understand how a broad set of exposures can impact the workloads of a security organization – and how important it becomes to prioritize properly and communicate effectively.

Gartner, 2024 Strategic Roadmap for Managing Threat Exposure, Pete Shoard, 8 November 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

4 Takeaways from the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP

Post Syndicated from Aaron Wells original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/04/25/4-takeaways-cnapp-2023-gartner-market-guide-report/

4 Takeaways from the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP

In an ongoing effort to help security organizations gain greater visibility into risk, we’re pleased to offer this complimentary Gartner research, and share our 4 Takeaways from the 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for CNAPP. This critical research can help security leaders take an in-depth look into cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs), and evaluate potential solutions that best fit their specific environments.

Takeaway #1: Attack surfaces are increasing

There’s nothing minor about misconfigurations. If a cloud resource or service is misconfigured, attackers will target and exploit it. It may not even be a misconfiguration in your cloud network, but one found in a supply chain partner that puts everyone’s infrastructure at risk. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are at risk as well, and are being increasingly targeted by threat actors because they’re such a critical component of the build process. The report states:

“CNAPP offerings bring together multiple disparate security and protection capabilities into a single platform that most importantly is able to identify, prioritize, enable collaboration and help remediate excessive risk across the extremely complex logical boundary of a modern cloud-native application.”

Takeaway #2: Developer scope is expanding

As organizations increasingly look to shift left, developers are being asked to take on a more active role in ensuring their applications and the supporting cloud infrastructure are secure and compliant. We feel the report reiterates this point, stating:

“Shifting risk visibility left requires a deep understanding of the development pipeline and artifacts and extending vulnerability scanning earlier into the development pipeline as these artifacts are being created.”

However, the report also states that developers are increasingly responsible for operational tasks, such as addressing vulnerabilities, deploying infrastructure as code, and deploying and tearing down implementations in production, thus requiring tools that address this expanded scope

Extra tooling is needed to address these concerns, with the very real possibility that tooling will be fragmented if it’s coming from different vendors and addressing different parts of the application development process. As far as recommendations, the report states:

“Reduce complexity and improve the developer experience by choosing integrated CNAPP offerings that provide complete life cycle visibility and protection of cloud-native applications across development and staging and into runtime operation.”

Takeaway #3: Context around risk is needed

Developers simply do not want the process to be slowed. Security is important, but if developers are constantly tripped up in their workflows, it’s almost inevitable that adoption of security practices and tooling will become a struggle. Therefore, it’s critical to prioritize security tasks and provide the context needed to remediate the issue as quickly as possible.

That can, however, be easier said than done when collecting disparate information and trying to gain as much visibility as possible into an environment. Let’s look at a few ways to understand context in security data:

  • Set VM processes to detect more than just vulnerabilities in the cloud. It’s also key to be able to see misconfigurations and issues with IAM permissions as well as understand resource/service configurations, permissions and privileges, which applications are running and what data is stored inside. These processes help to contextualize and action on the highest-priority risks.
  • Identify if a vulnerable instance is publicly accessible and the nature of its business application — this will help you determine the scope of the vulnerability.
  • Simply saying developers need to find and fix vulnerabilities in production or pre-production by shifting security left is generally an oversimplification. It’s critical to communicate with developers about why a vulnerability is being prioritized and specific actions they can take to remediate.

Takeaway #4: Depth of functionality is critical

Gartner states that “multiple providers market CNAPP capabilities — some starting with runtime expertise and some starting with development expertise. Few offer the required breadth and depth of functionality with integration between all components across development and operations.” Each customer’s situation will be specific; therefore, there will be no one-size-fits-all solution. Ideally, though, a provider should be able to offer runtime risk visibility, cloud risk visibility, and development artifact risk visibility.

As customer feedback helps to refine the offerings of CNAPP providers, Gartner shares that one of the reasons for moving towards consolidation to a CNAPP offering is to eliminate redundant capabilities. Moving forward, there is a strong customer preference to consolidate vendors.

To secure and protect

That’s the name of the game: to secure and protect cloud-native applications across the development and production lifecycle. Unknown risks can appear anywhere in the process, but it’s possible to mitigate many of these vulnerabilities and blockers. Learn how CNAPP offerings deliver an integrated set of capabilities spanning runtime visibility and control, CSPM capabilities, software composition analysis (SCA) capabilities and container scanning. Download and read the full Market Guide now.

Gartner, “Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms” Neil MacDonald, Charlie Winckless, Dale Koeppen. 14 March 2023.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Post Syndicated from Sam Rhea original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-sse-gartner-magic-quadrant/

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Gartner has recognized Cloudflare in the 2023 “Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge (SSE)” report for its ability to execute and completeness of vision. We are excited to share that the Cloudflare Zero Trust solution, part of our Cloudflare One platform, is one of only ten vendors recognized in the report.

Of the 10 companies named to this year’s Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ report, Cloudflare is the only new vendor addition. You can read more about our position in the report and what customers say about using Cloudflare One here.

Cloudflare is also the newest vendor when measured by the date since our first products in the SSE space launched. We launched Cloudflare Access, our best-in-class Zero Trust access control product, a little less than five years ago. Since then, we have released hundreds of features and shipped nearly a dozen more products to create a comprehensive SSE solution that over 10,000 organizations trust to keep their organizations data, devices and teams both safe and fast. We moved that quickly because we built Cloudflare One on top of the same network that already secures and accelerates large segments of the Internet today.

We deliver our SSE services on the same servers and in the same locations that serve some of the world’s largest Internet properties. We combined existing advantages like the world’s fastest DNS resolver, Cloudflare’s serverless compute platform, and our ability to route and accelerate traffic around the globe. We might be new to the report, but customers who select Cloudflare One are not betting on an upstart provider; they are choosing an industry-leading solution made possible by a network that already secures millions of destinations and billions of users every day.

We are flattered by the recognition from Gartner this week and even more thrilled by the customer outcomes we make possible today. That said, we are not done and we are only going faster.

What is a Security Service Edge?

A Security Service Edge (SSE) “secures access to the web, cloud services and private applications. Capabilities include access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable-use control enforced by network-based and API-based integration. SSE is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service, and may include on-premises or agent-based components.”1

The SSE space developed to meet organizations as they encountered a new class of security problems. Years ago, teams could keep their devices, services, and data safe by hiding from the rest of the world behind a figurative castle-and-moat. The defense perimeter for an enterprise corresponded to the literal walls of their office. Applications ran in server closets or self-managed data centers. Businesses could deploy firewalls, proxies, and filtering appliances in the form of on-premise hardware. Remote users suffered through the setup by backhauling their traffic through the physical office with a legacy virtual private network (VPN) client.

That model began to break down when applications started to leave the building. Teams began migrating to SaaS tools and public cloud providers. They could no longer control security by placing physical appliances in the flow of their one path to the Internet.

Meanwhile, users also left the office, placing stress on the ability of a self-managed private network to scale with the traffic. Performance and availability suffered while costs increased as organizations carried more traffic and deployed more bandaids to try and buy time.

Bad actors also evolved. Attacks became more sophisticated and exploited the migration away from a classic security perimeter. The legacy appliances deployed could not keep up with the changes in attack patterns and scale of attacks.

SSE vendors provide organizations with a cloud-based solution to those challenges. SSE providers deploy and maintain security services in their own points of presence or in a public cloud provider, giving enterprises a secure first hop before they connect to the rest of the Internet or to their internal tools. IT teams can deprecate the physical or virtual appliances that they spent days maintaining. Security teams benefit from filtering and policies that update constantly to defend against new threats.

Some SSE features target remote access replacement by offering customers the ability to connect users to internal tools with Zero Trust access control rules. Other parts of an SSE platform focus on applying Zero Trust scrutiny to the rest of the Internet, replacing the on-premise filtering appliances of an enterprise with cloud-based firewalls, resolvers, and proxies that filter and log traffic leaving a device closer to the user instead of forcing a backhaul to a centralized location.

What about SASE?

You might also be familiar with the term Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). We hear customers talk about their “SASE” goals more often than “SSE” alone. SASE extends the definition of SSE to include managing the connectivity of the traffic being secured. Network-as-a-Service vendors help enterprises connect their users, devices, sites, and services. SSE providers secure that traffic.

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Most vendors focus on one side of the equation. Network-as-a-service companies sell software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), interconnection, and traffic optimization solutions to help enterprises manage and accelerate connectivity, but those enterprises wind up losing those benefits by sending all that traffic to an SSE provider for filtering. SSE providers deliver security tools for traffic of nearly any type, but they still need customers to buy additional networking services to get that traffic to their locations.

Cloudflare One is a single vendor SASE platform. Cloudflare offers enterprises a comprehensive network-as-a-service where teams can send all traffic to Cloudflare’s network, where we can help teams manage connectivity and improve performance. Enterprises can choose from flexible on-ramps, like their existing hardware routers, agents running on laptops and mobile devices, physical and virtual interconnects, or Cloudflare’s own last mile connector.

When that traffic reaches Cloudflare’s network, our SSE services apply security filtering in the same locations where we manage and route connectivity. Cloudflare’s SSE solution does not add additional hops; we deliver filtering and logging in-line with the traffic we accelerate for our customers. The value of our single vendor SASE solution is just another outcome of an obsession we’ve had since we first launched our reverse proxy over ten years ago: customers should not have to compromise performance for security and vice versa.

So where does Cloudflare One fit?

Cloudflare One connects enterprises to the tools they need while securing their devices, applications and data without compromising on performance. The platform consists of two primary components: our Cloudflare Zero Trust products, which represent our SSE offering, and our network-as-a-service solution. As much as today’s announcement separates out those features, we prefer to talk about how they work together.

Cloudflare’s network-as-a-service offering, our Magic WAN solution, extends our network for customers to use as their own. Enterprises can take advantage of the investments we have made over more than a decade to build out one of the world’s most peered, most performant, and most available networks. Teams can connect individual roaming devices, offices and physical sites, or entire networks and data centers through Cloudflare to the rest of the Internet or internal destinations.

We want to make it as easy as possible for customers to send us their traffic, so we provide many flexible “on-ramps” to easily fit into their existing infrastructure. Enterprises can use our roaming agent to connect user devices, our Cloudflare Tunnel service for application-level connectivity, network-level tunnels from our Magic WAN Connector or their existing router or SD-WAN hardware, and/or direct physical or virtual interconnections for dedicated connectivity to on-prem or cloud infrastructure at 1,600+ locations around the world. When packets arrive at the closest Cloudflare location, we provide optimization, acceleration and logging to give customers visibility into their traffic flows.

Instead of sending that accelerated traffic to an additional intermediary for security filtering, our Cloudflare Zero Trust platform can take over to provide SSE security filtering in the same location – generally on the exact same server – as our network-as-a-service functions. Enterprises can pick and choose what SSE features they want to enable to strengthen their security posture over time.

Cloudflare One and the SSE feature set

The security features inside of Cloudflare One provide comprehensive SSE coverage to enterprises operating at any scale. Customers just need to send traffic to a Cloudflare location within a few milliseconds of their users and Cloudflare Zero Trust handles everything else.

Cloudflare One named in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Security Service Edge

Cloudflare One SSE Capabilities

Zero Trust Access Control
Cloudflare provides a Zero Trust VPN replacement for teams that host and control their own resources. Customers can deploy a private network inside of Cloudflare’s network for more traditional connectivity or extend access to contractors without any agent required. Regardless of how users connect, and for any type of destination they need, Cloudflare’s network gives administrators the ability to build granular rules on a per-resource or global basis. Teams can combine one or more identity providers, device posture inputs, and other sources of signal to determine when and how a user should be able to connect.

Organizations can also extend these types of Zero Trust access control rules to the SaaS applications where they do not control the hosting by introducing Cloudflare’s identity proxy into the login flow. They can continue to use their existing identity provider but layer on additional checks like device posture, country, and multifactor method.

DNS filtering
Cloudflare’s DNS filtering solution runs on the world’s fastest DNS resolver, filtering and logging the DNS queries leaving individual devices or some of the world’s largest networks.

Network firewall
Organizations that maintain on-premise hardware firewalls or cloud-based equivalents can deprecate their boxes by sending traffic through Cloudflare where our firewall-as-a-service can filter and log traffic. Our Network Firewall includes L3-L7 filtering, Intrusion Detection, and direct integrations with our Threat Intelligence feeds and the rest of our SSE suite. It enables security teams to build sophisticated policies without any of the headaches of traditional hardware: no capacity or redundancy planning, no throughput restrictions, no manual patches or upgrades.

Secure Web Gateway
Cloudflare’s Secure Web Gateway (SWG) service inspects, filters, and logs traffic in a Cloudflare PoP close to a user regardless of where they work. The SWG can block HTTP requests bound for dangerous destinations, scan traffic for viruses and malware, and control how traffic routes to the rest of the Internet without the need for additional hardware or virtualized services.

In-line Cloud Access Security Broker and Shadow IT
The proliferation of SaaS applications can help teams cut costs but poses a real risk; sometimes users prefer tools other than the ones selected by their IT or Security teams. Cloudflare’s in-line Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) gives administrators the tools to make sure employees use SaaS applications as intended. Teams can build tenant control rules that restrict employees from logging into personal accounts, policies that only allow file uploads of certain types to approved SaaS applications, and filters that restrict employees from using unapproved services.

Cloudflare’s “Shadow IT” service scans and catalogs user traffic to the Internet to help IT and Security teams detect and monitor the unauthorized use of SaaS applications. For example, teams can ensure that their approved cloud storage is the only place where users can upload materials.

API-driven Cloud Access Security Broker
Cloudflare’s superpower is our network, but sometimes the worst attacks start with data sitting still. Teams that adopt SaaS applications can share work products and collaborate together from any location; that same convenience makes it simple for mistakes or bad actors to cause a serious data breach.

In some cases, employees might overshare a document with sensitive information by selecting the wrong button in the “Share” menu. With just one click, a spreadsheet with customer contact data could become public on the Internet. In other situations, users might share a report with their personal account without realizing they just violated internal compliance rules.

Regardless of how the potential data breach started, Cloudflare’s API-driven CASB constantly scans the SaaS applications that your team uses for potential misconfiguration and data loss. Once detected, Cloudflare’s CASB will alert administrators and provide a comprehensive guide to remediating the incident.

Data Loss Prevention
Cloudflare’s Data Loss Prevention service scans traffic to detect and block potential data loss. Administrators can select from common precreated profiles, like social security numbers or credit card numbers, or create their own criteria using regular expressions or integrate with existing Microsoft Information Protection labels.

Remote Browser Isolation
Cloudflare’s browser isolation service runs a browser inside of our network, in a data center just milliseconds from the user, and sends the vector rendering of the web page to the local device. Team members can use any modern browser and, unlike other approaches, the Internet just feels like the Internet. Administrators can isolate sites on the fly, choosing to only isolate unknown destinations or providing contractors with an agentless workstation. Security teams can add additional protection like blocking copy-paste or printing.

Security beyond the SSE

Many of the customers who talk to us about their SSE goals are not ready to begin adopting every security service in the category from Day 1. Instead, they tend to have strategic SSE goals and tactical immediate problems. That’s fine. We can meet customers wherever they begin on their journey and sometimes that journey starts with pain points that sit just a bit outside of the current SSE definition. We can help in those areas, too.

Many of the types of attacks that an SSE model aims to prevent begin with email, but that falls outside of the traditional SSE definition. Attackers will target specific employees or entire workforces with phishing links or malware that the default filtering available from email providers today miss.

We want to help customers stop these attacks at the inbox before SSE features like DNS or SWG filtering need to apply. Cloudflare One includes industry-leading email security through our Area 1 product to protect teams regardless of their email provider. Area 1 is not just a standalone solution bundled into our SSE; Cloudflare Zero Trust features work better together alongside Area 1. Suspicious emails can open links in an isolated browser, for example, to give customers a defense-in-depth security model without the risk of more IT help desk tickets.

Cloudflare One customers can also take advantage of another Gartner-recognized platform in Cloudflare, our application security suite. Cloudflare’s industry-leading application security features, like our Web Application Firewall and DDoS mitigation service, can be deployed in-line with our Zero Trust security features. Teams can add bot management alerts, API protection, and faster caching to their internal tools with a single click.

Why Cloudflare?

Over 10,000 organizations trust Cloudflare One to connect and secure their enterprise. Cloudflare One helps protect and accelerate teams from the world’s largest IT organization, the US Federal Government, to thousands of small groups who rely on our free plan. A couple of months ago we spoke with customers as part of our CIO Week to listen to the reasons they select Cloudflare One. Their feedback followed a few consistent themes.

1) Cloudflare One delivers more complete security
Nearly every SSE vendor offers improved security compared to a traditional castle-and-moat model, but that is a low bar. We built the security features in Cloudflare One to be best in class. Our industry-leading access control solution provides more built-in options to control who can connect to the tools that power your business.

We partner leading identity providers and endpoint protection platforms, like Microsoft and CrowdStrike, to provide a Zero Trust VPN replacement that is better than anything else on the market. On the outbound filtering side, every filtering option relies on threat intelligence gathered and curated by Cloudforce One, our dedicated threat research team.

2) Cloudflare One makes your team faster
Cloudflare One accelerates your end users from the first moment they connect to the Internet by starting with the world’s fastest DNS resolver. End users send those DNS queries and establish connectivity over a secure tunnel optimized based on feedback from the millions of users who rely on our popular consumer forward proxy. Entire sites connect through a variety of tunnel options to Cloudflare’s network where we are the fastest connectivity provider for the most number of the world’s 3,000 largest networks.

We compete and measure ourselves against pure connectivity providers. When we measure ourselves against pure SSE providers, like Zscaler, we significantly outperform by 38% to 59% depending on use case.

3) Cloudflare One is easier to manage
The Cloudflare Zero Trust products are unique in the SSE market in that we offer a free plan that covers nearly every feature. We make these services available at no cost to groups of up to 50 users because we believe that security on the Internet should be accessible to anyone on any budget.

A consequence of that commitment is that we built products that have to be easy to use. Unlike other SSE providers who only sell to the enterprise and can rely on large systems integrators for deployment, we had to create a solution that any team could deploy. From human rights organizations without full-time IT departments to start ups who want to spend more time building and less time worrying about vulnerabilities.

We also know that administrators want more options than just an intuitive dashboard. We provide API support for managing every Cloudflare One feature, and we maintain a Terraform provider for teams that need the option for peer reviewed configuration-as-code management.

4) Cloudflare One is the most cost-efficient comprehensive SASE offering
Cloudflare is responsible for delivering and securing millions of websites on the Internet every day. To support that volume of traffic, we had to build our network for scale and cost-efficiency.

The largest enterprises’ internal network traffic does not (yet) match the volume of even moderately popular Internet properties. When those teams send traffic to Cloudflare One, we rely on the same hardware and the same data centers that power our application services business to apply security and networking features. As a result, we can help deliver comprehensive security to any team at a price point that is made possible by our existing investment in our network.

5) Cloudflare can be your single, consolidated security vendor
Cloudflare One is only the most recent part of the Cloudflare platform to be recognized in industry analyst reports. In 2022 Gartner named Cloudflare a Leaderin Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). When customers select Cloudflare to solve their SSE challenges, they have the opportunity to add best-in-class solutions all from the same vendor.

Dozens of independent analyst firms continue to recognize Cloudflare for our ability to deliver results to our customers on services ranging from DDoS protection, CDN and edge computing to bot management.

What’s next?

When customers choose Cloudflare One, they trust our network to secure the most sensitive aspects of their enterprise without slowing down their business. We are grateful to the more than 10,000 organizations who have selected us as their vendor in the last five years, from small teams on our free plan to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

Today’s announcement only accelerates the momentum in Cloudflare One. We are focused on building the next wave of security and connectivity features our customers need to focus on their own mission. We’re going to keep going faster to help more and more organizations. Want to get started on that journey with us? Let us know here and we’ll reach out.

Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge”, Analyst(s): Charlie Winckless, Aaron McQuaid, John Watts, Craig Lawson, Thomas Lintemuth, Dale Koeppen, April 10, 2023.

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1https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/security-service-edge-sse

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

We’re Challenging Convention. Rapid7 Recognized in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM.

Post Syndicated from Meaghan Donlon original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/10/13/rapid7-recognized-in-the-2022-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-siem/

We're Challenging Convention. Rapid7 Recognized in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM.

As the attack surface sprawls, under-resourced security teams have inherent disadvantages. Rapid7 InsightIDR enables resource constrained security teams to achieve sophisticated detection and response, with greater efficiency and efficacy. As a Challenger in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM, we’re proud to represent the huge number of security teams out there today that don’t have time to do it all, but are asked to do it anyway. Our goal is to keep your organization safe by finding and eliminating threats faster and more reliably.

We're Challenging Convention. Rapid7 Recognized in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM.

Gartner Peer® Insights™

Rapid7 maximizes your most precious resource: time

We are grateful to have a diverse collective of customers and partners around the world, of varying size and industry focus. These smart, agile, maturing teams want to advance their detection and response programs, but their organizations and the threats they face are moving faster than their capacity is growing. The constant that unites all of these teams: they never have enough time. Yet, we feel that despite a well-documented, industry-crushing skills gap, far too many traditional SIEMs and detection products continue to introduce additional noise and complexity for these teams. The result is long days, weekend work, far too many missed dinners / concerts / games, and (scariest of all) missed threats.

The best way to achieve successful detection and response is through a pragmatic and efficient approach. Threats are still a threat—whether or not you’ve had time to set up your complex traditional SIEM or the myriad of point detection solutions around it. Attackers don’t care if you’re ready. In fact, they’re counting on you not to be. Security teams need time and access to expertise to close this gap.

That’s where we believe Rapid7 can help.

We're Challenging Convention. Rapid7 Recognized in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM.

Gartner® Peer Insights™

Time-to-value and efficiency at every step

From inception, the guiding principle of InsightIDR has been to deliver sophisticated detection and response, in a more efficient and effective way, and here’s how:

  • A cloud-native foundation, SaaS delivery, and software-based collectors means it is faster to deploy, removes hardware burdens that bog teams down, and accelerates the time to actually get insights.
  • Intuitive interfaces, pre-built dashboards and reports, and a robust detections library means that teams are able to activate even the most junior analysts to deliver advanced analysis and threat detections right away.
  • And highly correlated investigation timelines, response recommendations (vetted by Rapid7’s MDR team), and pre-built automation workflows help you with one of the hardest parts of your job: responding to threats before significant damage occurs.

In short, we offer a SIEM that maturing teams can get real value from. Over the last seven years, we’ve struck a balance of adding a multitude of capabilities while never compromising our core tenet and commitment to providing you with productivity efficiency and delivering a better detection and response experience.

We're Challenging Convention. Rapid7 Recognized in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM.

Gartner® Peer Insights™

High-fidelity, expertly vetted detections

Leveraging a diverse mix of threat intelligence—including unique intel from Rapid7’s renowned open-source projects—the Rapid7 Threat Intelligence and Detections Engineering (TIDE) team curates emergent threat content from all corners of the threat landscape. Our TIDE team is constantly manicuring a library of both known and unknown threats to capture even the most evasive attacks. With this always-up-to-date library and native UEBA, EDR, NDR, deception technology, and cloud TDIR, InsightIDR customers can be confident that the entirety of their attack surface is covered. And because our global MDR team is leveraging the same threat library, you can be certain that alerts will be low noise, highly reliable, and primed for analysts to take action.

We're Challenging Convention. Rapid7 Recognized in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for SIEM.

Gartner Peer® Insights™

The future of detection & response

We believe that as the threat and attack landscape change at a rapid pace, the approaches to unifying data, detecting, and responding need to too. Reducing the noise and accelerating response outcomes is critical for security success – regardless of your security maturity. We also believe that for this reason, Gartner has named us a Challenger in the Magic Quadrant for SIEM – and we will continue to challenge the traditional as we focus on building the right outcomes for our customers. Find a complimentary copy of the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM here.

Just a few of those outcomes we are driving toward in the future:

  • More frictionless access to expertise to ensure analysts always know how to respond and can execute more quickly
  • Deepening our breadth of detections and endpoint coverage for modern, dynamic environments, so customers can continue to leverage InsightIDR as their single source of truth for detection and response
  • Making sure our MSSP partners and their customers are optimized to succeed by providing a more turnkey experience that enables these partners to tap into the scale and efficiency of InsightIDR

We are excited to share more on these initiatives soon. Thank you to our customers and partners for continuing to share your insights, ideas, pains, and future plans. You continue to fuel our innovation and validate that we are on the right track in addressing the needs of maturing security teams.

Get the full report

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GARTNER and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service marks, and PEER INSIGHTS is a trademark and service mark, of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Prioritizing XDR in 2023: Stronger Detection and Response With Less Complexity

Post Syndicated from KJ McCann original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/09/21/prioritizing-xdr-in-2023-stronger-detection-and-response-with-less-complexity/

Prioritizing XDR in 2023: Stronger Detection and Response With Less Complexity

As we get closer to closing out 2022, the talk in the market continues to swirl around extended detection and response (XDR) solutions. What are they? What are the benefits? Should my team adopt XDR, and if yes, how do we evaluate vendors to determine the best approach?

While there continue to be many different definitions of XDR in the market, the common themes around this technology consistently are:

  • Tightly integrated security products delivering common threat prevention, detection, and incident response capabilities
  • Out-of-the-box operational efficiencies that require minimal customization
  • Security orchestration and automation functions to streamline repetitive processes and accelerate response
  • High-quality detection content with limited tuning required
  • Advanced analytics that can correlate alerts from multiple sources into incidents

Simply put, XDR is an evolution of the security ecosystem in order to provide elevated and stronger security for resource-constrained security teams.

XDR for 2023

Why is XDR the preferred cybersecurity solution? With an ever-expanding attack surface and diverse and complex threats, security operations centers (SOCs) need more visibility and stronger threat coverage across their environment – without creating additional pockets of siloed data from point solutions.

A 2022 study of security leaders found that the average security team is now managing 76 different tools – with sprawl driven by a need to keep pace with cloud adoption and remote working requirements. Because of the exponential growth of tools, security teams are spending more than half their time manually producing reports, pulling in data from multiple siloed tools. An XDR solution offers significant operational efficiency benefits by centralizing all that data to form a cohesive picture of your environment.

Is XDR the right move for your organization?

When planning your security for the next year, consider what outcomes you want to achieve in 2023.

Security product and vendor consolidation

To combat increasing complexity, security and risk leaders are looking for effective ways to consolidate their security stack – without compromising the ability to detect threats across a growing attack surface. In fact, 75% of security professionals are pursuing a vendor consolidation strategy today, up from just 29% two years ago. An XDR approach can be an effective path for minimizing the number of tools your SOC needs to manage while still bringing together critical telemetry to power detection and response. For this reason, many teams are prioritizing XDR in 2023 to spearhead their consolidation movement. It’s predicted that by year-end 2027, XDR will be used by up to 40% of end-user organizations to reduce the number of security vendors they have in place.

As you explore prioritizing XDR in 2023, it’s important to remember that all XDR is not created equal. A hybrid XDR approach may enable you to select top products across categories but will still require significant deployment, configuration, and ongoing management to bring these products together (not to mention multiple vendor relationships and expenses to tackle). A native XDR approach delivers a more inclusive suite of capabilities from a single vendor. For resource-constrained teams, a native approach may be superior to hybrid as there is likely to be less work on behalf of the customer. A native XDR does much of the consolidation work for you, while a hybrid XDR helps you consolidate.

Improved security operations efficiency and productivity

“Efficiency” is a big promise of XDR, but this can look different for many teams. How do you measure efficiency today? What areas are currently inefficient and could be made faster or easier? Understanding this baseline and where your team is losing time today will help you know what to prioritize when you pursue an XDR strategy in 2023.

A strong XDR replaces existing tools and processes with alternative, more efficient working methods. Example processes to evaluate as you explore XDR:

  • Data ingestion: As your organization grows, you want to be sure your XDR can grow with it. Cloud-native XDR platforms will be especially strong in this category, as they will have the elastic foundation necessary to keep pace with your environment. Consider also how you’ll add new event sources over time. This can be a critical area to improve efficiency.
  • Dashboards and reporting: Is your team equipped to create and manage custom queries, reports, and dashboards? Creating and distributing reports can be extremely time-consuming – especially for newer analysts. If your team doesn’t have the time for constant dashboard creation, consider XDR approaches that offer prebuilt content and more intuitive experiences that will satisfy these use cases.
  • Detections: With a constant evolution of threat actors and behaviors, it’s important to evaluate if your team has the time to bring together the necessary threat intelligence and detection rule creation to stay ahead of emergent threats. Effective XDR can greatly reduce or potentially eliminate the need for your team to manually create and manage detection rules by offering built-in detection libraries. It’s important to understand the breadth and fidelity of the detections library offered by your vendor and ensure that this content addresses the needs of your organization.
  • Automation: Finding the right balance for your SOC between technology and human expertise will allow analysts to apply their skills and training in critical areas without having to maintain repetitive and mundane tasks additionally. Because different XDR solutions offer different instances of automation, prioritize workflows that will provide the most benefit to your team. Some example use cases would be connecting processes across your IT and security teams, automating incident response to common threats, or reducing any manual or repetitive tasks.

Accelerated investigations and response

While XDR solutions claim to host a variety of features that can accelerate your investigation and response process, it’s important to understand how your team currently functions. Start by identifying your mean time to respond (MTTR) at present, then what your goal MTTR is for the future. Once you lay that out, look back at how analysts currently investigate and respond to attacks and note any skill or knowledge gaps, so you can understand what capabilities will best assist your team. XDR aims to paint a fuller picture of attacker behavior, so security teams can better analyze and respond to it.

Some examples of questions that can build out the use cases you require to meet your target ROI for next year.

  • During an investigation, where is your team spending the majority of their time?
  • What established processes are currently in place for threat response?
  • How adaptable is your team when faced with new and unknown threat techniques?
  • Do you have established playbooks for specific threats? Does your team know what to do when these fire?

Again, having a baseline of where your organization is today will help you define more realistic goals and requirements going forward. When evaluating XDR products, dig into how they will shorten the window for attackers to succeed and drive a more effective response for your team. For a resource-constrained team, you may especially want to consider how an XDR approach can:

  • Reduce the amount of noise that your team needs to triage and ensure analysts zero in on top priority threats
  • Shorten the time for effective investigation by providing relevant events, evidence, and intelligence around a specific attack
  • Provide effective playbooks that maximize autonomy for analysts, enabling them to respond to threats confidently without the need to escalate or do excessive investigation
  • Deliver one-click automation that analysts can leverage to accelerate a response after they have accessed the situation

Unlock the potential of XDR with Rapid7

If you and your team prioritize XDR in 2023, we’d love to help. Rapid7’s native XDR approach unlocks advanced threat detection and accelerated response for resource-constrained teams. With 360-degree attack surface coverage, teams have a sophisticated view across both the internal – and external – threat landscape. Rapid7 Threat Intelligence and Detection Engineering curate an always up-to-date library of threat detections – vetted in the field by our MDR SOC experts to ensure high-fidelity, actionable alerts. And with recommended response playbooks and pre-built workflows, your team will always be ready to respond to threats quickly and confidently.

To learn more about the current market for XDR and receive additional perspectives, check out Gartner’s Market Guide for Extended Detection and Response.

Additional reading:

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Cloudflare named a Leader by Gartner

Post Syndicated from Michael Tremante original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-waap-named-leader-gartner-magic-quadrant-2022/

Cloudflare named a Leader by Gartner

Cloudflare named a Leader by Gartner

Gartner has recognised Cloudflare as a Leader in the 2022 “Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP)” report that evaluated 11 vendors for their ‘ability to execute’ and ‘completeness of vision’.

You can register for a complimentary copy of the report here.

We believe this achievement highlights our continued commitment and investment in this space as we aim to provide better and more effective security solutions to our users and customers.

Keeping up with application security

With over 36 million HTTP requests per second being processed by the Cloudflare global network we get unprecedented visibility into network patterns and attack vectors. This scale allows us to effectively differentiate clean traffic from malicious, resulting in about 1 in every 10 HTTP requests proxied by Cloudflare being mitigated at the edge by our WAAP portfolio.

Visibility is not enough, and as new use cases and patterns emerge, we invest in research and new product development. For example, API traffic is increasing (55%+ of total traffic) and we don’t expect this trend to slow down. To help customers with these new workloads, our API Gateway builds upon our WAF to provide better visibility and mitigations for well-structured API traffic for which we’ve observed different attack profiles compared to standard web based applications.

We believe our continued investment in application security has helped us gain our position in this space, and we’d like to thank Gartner for the recognition.

Cloudflare WAAP

At Cloudflare, we have built several features that fall under the Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) umbrella.

DDoS protection & mitigation

Our network, which spans more than 275 cities in over 100 countries is the backbone of our platform, and is a core component that allows us to mitigate DDoS attacks of any size.

To help with this, our network is intentionally anycasted and advertises the same IP addresses from all locations, allowing us to “split” incoming traffic into manageable chunks that each location can handle with ease, and this is especially important when mitigating large volumetric Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

The system is designed to require little to no configuration while also being “always-on” ensuring attacks are mitigated instantly. Add to that some very smart software such as our new location aware mitigation, and DDoS attacks become a solved problem.

For customers with very specific traffic patterns, full configurability of our DDoS Managed Rules is just a click away.

Web Application Firewall

Our WAF is a core component of our application security and ensures hackers and vulnerability scanners have a hard time trying to find potential vulnerabilities in web applications.

This is very important when zero-day vulnerabilities become publicly available as we’ve seen bad actors attempt to leverage new vectors within hours of them becoming public. Log4J, and even more recently the Confluence CVE, are just two examples where we observed this behavior. That’s why our WAF is also backed by a team of security experts who constantly monitor and develop/improve signatures to ensure we “buy” precious time for our customers to harden and patch their backend systems when necessary. Additionally, and complementary to signatures, our WAF machine learning system classifies each request providing a much wider view in traffic patterns.

Our WAF comes packed with many advanced features such as leaked credential checks, advanced analytics and alerting and payload logging.

Bot Management

It is no secret that a large portion of web traffic is automated, and while not all automation is bad, some is unnecessary and may also be malicious.

Our Bot Management product works in parallel to our WAF and scores every request with the likelihood of it being generated by a bot, allowing you to easily filter unwanted traffic by deploying a WAF Custom Rule, all this backed by powerful analytics. We make this easy by also maintaining a list of verified bots that can be used to further improve a security policy.

In the event you want to block automated traffic, Cloudflare’s managed challenge ensures that only bots receive a hard time without impacting the experience of real users.

API Gateway

API traffic, by definition, is very well-structured relative to standard web pages consumed by browsers. At the same time, APIs tend to be closer abstractions to back end databases and services, resulting in increased attention from malicious actors and often go unnoticed even to internal security teams (shadow APIs).

API Gateway, that can be layered on top of our WAF, helps you both discover API endpoints served by your infrastructure, as well detect potential anomalies in traffic flows that may indicate compromise, both from a volumetric and sequential perspective.

The nature of APIs also allows API Gateway to much more easily provide a positive security model contrary to our WAF: only allow known good traffic and block everything else. Customers can leverage schema protection and mutual TLS authentication (mTLS) to achieve this with ease.

Page Shield

Attacks that leverage the browser environment directly can go unnoticed for some time, as they don’t necessarily require the back end application to be compromised. For example, if any third party JavaScript library used by a web application is performing malicious behavior, application administrators and users may be none the wiser while credit card details are being leaked to a third party endpoint controlled by an attacker. This is a common vector for Magecart, one of many client side security attacks.

Page Shield is solving client side security by providing active monitoring of third party libraries and alerting application owners whenever a third party asset shows malicious activity. It leverages both public standards such as content security policies (CSP) along with custom classifiers to ensure coverage.

Page Shield, just like our other WAAP products, is fully integrated on the Cloudflare platform and requires one single click to turn on.

Security Center

Cloudflare’s new Security Center is the home of the WAAP portfolio. A single place for security professionals to get a broad view across both network and infrastructure assets protected by Cloudflare.

Moving forward we plan for the Security Center to be the starting point for forensics and analysis, allowing you to also leverage Cloudflare threat intelligence when investigating incidents.

The Cloudflare advantage

Our WAAP portfolio is delivered from a single horizontal platform, allowing you to leverage all security features without additional deployments. Additionally, scaling, maintenance and updates are fully managed by Cloudflare allowing you to focus on delivering business value on your application.

This applies even beyond WAAP, as, although we started building products and services for web applications, our position in the network allows us to protect anything connected to the Internet, including teams, offices and internal facing applications. All from the same single platform. Our Zero Trust portfolio is now an integral part of our business and WAAP customers can start leveraging our secure access service edge (SASE) with just a few clicks.

If you are looking to consolidate your security posture, both from a management and budget perspective, application services teams can use the same platform that internal IT services teams use, to protect staff and internal networks.

Continuous innovation

We did not build our WAAP portfolio overnight, and over just the past year we’ve released more than five major WAAP portfolio security product releases. To showcase our speed of innovation, here is a selection of our top picks:

  • API Shield Schema Protection: traditional signature based WAF approaches (negative security model) don’t always work well with well-structured data such as API traffic. Given the fast growth in API traffic across the network we built a new incremental product that allows you to enforce API schemas directly at the edge using a positive security model: only let well-formed data through to your origin web servers;
  • API Abuse Detection: complementary to API Schema Protection, API Abuse Detection warns you whenever anomalies are detected on your API endpoints. These can be triggered by unusual traffic flows or patterns that don’t follow normal traffic activity;
  • Our new Web Application Firewall: built on top of our new Edge Rules Engine, the core Web Application Firewall received a complete overhaul, all the way from engine internals to the UI. Better performance both in terms of latency and efficacy at blocking malicious payloads, along with brand-new capabilities including but not limited to Exposed Credential Checks, account wide configurations and payload logging;
  • DDoS customizable Managed Rules: to provide additional configuration flexibility, we started exposing some of our internal DDoS mitigation managed rules for custom configurations to further reduce false positives and allow customers to increase thresholds / detections as required;
  • Security Center: Cloudflare view on infrastructure and network assets, along with alerts and notifications for miss configurations and potential security issues;
  • Page Shield: based on growing customer demand and the rise of attack vectors focusing on the end user browser environment, Page Shield helps you detect whenever malicious JavaScript may have made its way into your application’s code;
  • API Gateway: full API management, including routing directly from the Cloudflare edge, with API Security baked in, including encryption and mutual TLS authentication (mTLS);
  • Machine Learning WAF: complementary to our WAF Managed Rulesets, our new ML WAF engine, scores every single request from 1 (clean) to 99 (malicious) giving you additional visibility in both valid and non-valid malicious payloads increasing our ability to detect targeted attacks and scans towards your application;

Looking forward

Our roadmap is packed with both new application security features and improvements to existing systems. As we learn more about the Internet we find ourselves better equipped to keep your applications safe. Stay tuned for more.

Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Web Application and API Protection”, Analyst(s): Jeremy D’Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, John Watts, Adam Hils, August 30, 2022.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation.

Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Rapid7 Named a Visionary in 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Application Security Testing Second Year in a Row

Post Syndicated from Bria Grangard original https://blog.rapid7.com/2022/04/21/rapid7-named-a-visionary-in-2022-magic-quadrant-for-application-security-testing-second-year-in-a-row/

Rapid7 Named a Visionary in 2022 Magic Quadrant™ for Application Security Testing Second Year in a Row

For the second year in a row, Rapid7 has been named a Visionary in the Gartner® 2022 Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing. We believe we accomplished this by combining an industry-leading dynamic application security testing (DAST) solution with container and cloud security, security across the software development life cycle (SDLC), strategic partnerships, and a customer-centric approach that anticipates the needs of not just security teams but DevOps teams as well. All in a package that is easy to utilize and highly accurate.

We are proud of the approach we have taken to keeping applications and APIs safe and secure. We recognized early that while DAST is the bedrock of a strong application security program, it works best when combined with the core capabilities we have built into our platform that allow for teams across the company to work together, rather than be siloed and inefficient.

Workflows that actually work for your business

We offer support for developer stakeholders across the SDLC (pre- and post-production), actively moving left in the lifecycle, and ensuring that applications and APIs are secure throughout the development process. This means teams can work cross-functionally, saving time and resulting in stronger security protections baked into the applications themselves. Our Attack Replay feature allows developers to confirm a vulnerability on their own, without the need to run a scan, making it even easier to find and remediate risks at any point in the process.

“The product provides our developers with actionable solutions to security risks that was missed during development.”

– Infosec analyst via Gartner Peer Insights

A full-picture view of your environment

At Rapid7, we are very proud of our history of innovative, modern, and forward-thinking vulnerability management solutions. However, it takes more than that to secure modern web applications. InsightAppSec integrates with the Insight platform, giving you a full view of your production environment. We have made a series of strategic investments and partnerships to expand the level and competency of our Insight platform, including those with Snyk and Checkmarx, which ensure that InsightAppSec is prepared to cover every level of your attack surface from every angle.

Our focus on cloud-native applications, in particular, means we have the tools to protect the most cutting-edge applications and to help those transitioning into the cloud — all with the ease and confidence that comes from our customer-centric approach to application security.

“In my opinion InsightAppSec approaches DAST the optimal way, with a cloud-based interface and the ability to spin up on-premises engines to perform scans. This means we’re not responsible for software updates, and the on-premises engines have an auto-update functionality that make them very low maintenance.”

– Sr. Software Security Engineer, IT Services via Gartner Peer Insights

World-class DAST

At the heart of our capabilities is our world-class DAST. It’s powerful, it’s accurate, it’s streamlined, and it’s cloud-based. This allows for security teams to spin up scans quickly and easily. We frequently hear from customers that we provide the most reliable results. Our Universal Translator allows coverage and attacks to be developed in parallel and released to customers as they are available, and it lets users perform security testing for traditional applications and modern applications.

“Our experience with Rapid7 products has always been positive. InsightAppSec is a great solution for DAST scanning of web apps and API. It gives great results even in unauthenticated scans and has a great UI.”

– Cybersecurity Architect, Banking Industry via Gartner Peer Insights

We are truly excited to be recognized as a Visionary in the latest Magic Quadrant, but we’re more excited for the many plans we have to improve and grow our AppSec offerings. We have always sought to redefine what modern application security looks like and are grateful to our customers and partners for taking this exciting journey with us.

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Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing, Dale Gardner, Mark Horvath, Dionisio Zumerle, 18th April

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Once Again, Rapid7 Named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM

Post Syndicated from Meaghan Donlon original https://blog.rapid7.com/2021/07/06/once-again-rapid7-named-a-leader-in-2021-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-siem/

Rapid7 is elated for InsightIDR to be recognized as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).

Once Again, Rapid7 Named a Leader in 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM

This is the second consecutive time our SaaS SIEM—InsightIDR—has been named a Leader in this report. Access the full complimentary report from us here.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant reports provide a matrix for evaluating technology vendors in a given space. The framework looks at vendors on two axes: completeness of vision and ability to execute. In the case of SIEM, “Gartner defines the security and information event management (SIEM) market by the customer’s need to analyze event data in real time for early detection of targeted attacks and data breaches, and to collect, store, investigate and report on log data for incident response, forensics and regulatory compliance.”

As the detection and response market becomes more competitive, and the demands and challenges of this space grow more complex, we are honored to be recognized as one of the 6 2021 Magic Quadrant Leaders named in this report. We believe we are recognized for our usability and customer experience, as these are areas we’ve invested heavily in and recognize as critical to the success of today’s detection and response programs.

"This Product has surpassed expectations" – Security Analyst, Energies and Utlities ★★★★★

Thank you

First and foremost, we want to thank our Rapid7 InsightIDR customers and partners for being on this journey with us. Your ongoing feedback, partnership, and trust have fueled our innovation and uncompromising commitment to delivering sophisticated security outcomes that are accessible to all.

Access the full 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant report here.

Accelerated change escalates challenges around modern detection and response

The last year has brought a swell of change for many organizations, including rapid cloud adoption, increased use of web applications, a significant shift to remote working, and new threats brought on by attackers exploiting circumstances around the pandemic. While these challenges weren’t new, their increased urgency highlighted cracks in an already fragile security ecosystem:

  • Increased cybersecurity demands widened the already growing skills gap
  • Uptime trumped security, often leaving SecOps professionals scrambling to keep up
  • The combination of these stresses drove many teams to a breaking point with alert fatigue

These market dynamics prompted a lot of Security Operations Center (SOC) teams to reevaluate current processes and systems, and push for change.

Rapid7 InsightIDR helps teams focus on what matters most to drive effective threat detection and response across modern IT environments

Our approach to detection and response has always been directed by what we hear from customers. This includes industry engagement and insights gathered through Rapid7’s research and open source communities, our firsthand experience with Rapid7 MDR (Managed Detection and Response) and services engagements, and of course, direct customer feedback. These collective learnings have enabled us to deeply understand the challenges facing SOC teams today, and pushed us to develop innovative solutions to anticipate and address their needs.

Rapid7 InsightIDR is not another log-aggregation-focused SIEM that sits on the shelf, or one that leaves the difficult and tedious work for security analysts to figure out on their own. Rather, our focus has always been to provide immediate, actionable insights and alerts that teams can feel confident responding to so they can extinguish threats quickly. With Rapid7 InsightIDR, security analysts are no longer fighting just to keep up. They’re empowered to scale and transform their security programs, however and wherever their environments evolve.

We are thrilled about this recognition, but like everything in cybersecurity, what’s most exciting is what happens next. We are committed to continually raising the bar and making it easier for SOC teams to accelerate their detection and response programs, while removing the distractions and noise that get in the way. Thank you again to our customers and partners for joining this journey with us. And stay tuned for more updates ahead soon!

"InsightIDR is my favorite SIEM because the preloaded detections for attacker tactics and techniques. The threat community within the platform is always providing new detections for IOCs. The team is always pleasant to work with, and I love all the feature updates we received this year!" – Information Security Engineer ★★★★★

Access the full 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant report here.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Rapid7.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Kelly Kavanagh, Toby Bussa, John Collins, 29 June 2021.