World News – US – Akamai rounds off SASE with application visibility, DLP – SDxCentral

Akamai today updated its secure cloud-based web gateway with data loss prevention, application visibility and control, and end-to-end security for DNS traffic. New capabilities complement Akamai’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) stack and will further support employees working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as remote and distributed infrastructure and workforce in the future, said Patrick Sullivan Akamai CTO of Security and Strategy

« The mega trends driving SASE are being able to bring security closer to end users wherever they are – if they are working remotely, if you have an M&A business, if you choose a new office somewhere, » he said

A SASE architecture also brings traffic inspection and security functions closer to compute, he added. « If you go to infrastructure as a service, if you choose new applications that are not close to the existing corporate data center, you will still have a very agile environment, » Sullivan said

The first of three new features integrates Data Loss Prevention (DLP) into Akamai’s Enterprise Threat Protector secure web gateway platform.This prevents the loss of personally identifiable data or other confidential business data that could be accidentally sent out of a company over the public Internet

It includes DLP dictionaries for Personally Identifiable Information, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and users can also create custom dictionaries based on these dictionaries

The second new feature of Enterprise Threat Protector – Application Visibility and Control – allows organizations to identify the applications in use, then block entire applications based on a risk score They can also block individual operations per app, such as allow downloads but block downloads

This addresses some of the Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) use cases included with SASE, such as shadow IT discovery and monitoring for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications

Across the industry, stand-alone CASBs and Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) are merging, Sullivan said, “So for us to be able to protect malware and browsing on the SWG side and then extend that to doing the CASB-like functionality with the discovery of IP shadow in a single proxy is a simplified approach « , he explains

And then Akamai’s third new addition to SWG secures DNS traffic as it travels between a device and a cloud resolver It does this by allowing businesses to add DNS encryption over TLS (DoT) through a client or through a virtual machine DNS forwarder This encrypts DNS traffic between corporate devices and Enterprise Threat Protector DNS resolvers

The platform already supports DNSSEC, and this new feature allows companies to have end-to-end security for DNS to reduce the risk of attackers intercepting and manipulating this traffic

Akamai has an interesting SASE game It started out as a content delivery network (CDN) provider, which gave it a well-established edge network long before it entered the hot SASE market. Its CDN remains a billion dollar company, Sullivan said

“We’ve been a cutting edge company for over 20 years, and we’re quite unique in our architecture, we’re made up of 4,000 POPs [points of presence],” he said. not many people build architectures this way « 

And long before Gartner came up with the sassy new security architecture, Akamai offered cloud-based web application protection, which Sullivan says is also a billion dollar company. This includes security services such as web application firewalls and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation

After protecting web applications, Akamai moved to untrustworthy network access and Forrester’s latest Forrester Wave assessing zero-trust providers made Akamai a leader in this industry

« As web security moved from the data center to the edge, we saw huge benefits there in terms of scale, deployments, user experience, the ability to decrypt and display traffic. at Layer 7, « said Sullivan » We believe those same sustainable platform benefits are here for us, as more and more applications are following this same path « 

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Akamai Technologies, Cloud Computing, Data Loss Prevention Software, Computer Security