The start of the year is welcomed by the annual Check Point Security Summit, hosted in Bangkok, New Orleans and Vienna. The Ultima security team attended this years’ EMEA event in Vienna, reported to be Check Points largest ever event with over 4500 attendees.
The event organised to enable product experts, R&D teams, partners and customers to come together and collaborate included keynote speeches, detailed breakout sessions, focused demonstrations and hands on labs; where the Ultima team scored one of the fastest ever times in the Cyber Range challenge – well done.
The theme of this years’ event was “Secure your EVERYTHING” and I think this sums up the current cyber landscape quite effectively. The requirement for a next generation security gateway is well known, but with focus on Zero Trust and increased use of dynamic mobile and cloud environments it is not the only surface area that needs protection.
Check Point have given focus to ensuring full threat prevention features are available for all organisations large and small, across all technologies and mediums used in the hyper-connected world. It is reported that 80% of corporate investment in IT security is focused on detection abilities, however the speed at which targeted threats can emerge and transit requires focus on AI based prevention with low false positives, immediate action and confidence that will not impact business critical operations. Check Point showcased their 60 security services, 20 of which are new in 2020 enabling organisations to focus on prevention in all areas of their estate; Network, Cloud, Endpoint, Mobile and IoT with a single consolidated management portal and unified policy under the Infinity Next architecture.
The amount of data and connected devices is increasing at a rate not seen before, just using a standard mobile phone I generated 7Gb of new data with photos taken during the event. Gil Shwed explained how with the marked uptake of connected smart devices, many of which are designed with functionality in mind rather than security, additional risks and threat vectors are becoming more common. The majority of mobile, IoT and OT devices contain critical data and access into critical environments but rely on external security controls; developments and additional features in the R80 and Infinity platforms bring new techniques and abilities to identify and manage these newer technologies and protect against compromise or use of these devices as a method into the environment.
Check Point also announced the release of their 6th generation technology; Nano now in Beta. Next generation is now the previous generation! Nano agent technology in collaboration with Check Points AI powered ThreatCloud service enables protection of data and services in an ever-increasing dynamic environment. Where cloud hosted container based and serverless micro services may start and stop on demand, and not have an allocated IP address on which to base a firewall policy on protection can be built in rather than bolted on. Nano agents can be built into workloads and templates securing these services, applications and data with all threat prevention facilities from the moment they are launched.
Supporting all these new capabilities and closing the gaps in security brought by new technologies is a continuing process, one at which Check Point is always at the forefront of. Check Point also demonstrate increased capabilities in their Quantum hardware series of appliances and wider CloudGuard suite. Full visibility and management of public and private clouds provided across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services with summary of See it, Control it, Secure it.
The future of cyber security looks impressive, with development in all areas and products. Please join our webinar more details on these topics and other announcements from this year’s seminar.
Written by Mark Goringe, Solutions Architect - Security
