I was honored to be a guest speaker at the dedication of Singapore’s ST Electronics DigiSAFE Cyber Security Centre earlier this month. What a delight to experience the new Centre, which is dedicated to hands-on training for Singapore’s Security Operations Center professionals and is the first of its kind in the region. Singapore IDA’s Managing Director, Ms. Jacqueline Poh, gave the opening address and unveiled the new Centre.
Globally, we frequently lament the lack of solid security talent at a time when attacks seem omnipresent. In my opinion, our partnership with the Centre is a great opportunity to showcase how the platform approach we’re taking at Palo Alto Networks can improve the experience of SOC operations.
Rather than a conga line approach to security, with lots of different products in use, or a UTM with discrete security functions that never “talk” to one another, our platform approach gives security practitioners:
- Visibility to all applications, content and users. You can then build security policies to provide application whitelisting according to employee, business unit, etc.
- Closed loop communication and correlation. Once an unknown threat comes in, it’s punted to the cloud sandbox where it’s executed. The output from that analysis then enables onboard signature creation for future issues from that threat. You also have the benefit of what you’re learning from the URL filtering in which you can compare threat data with known “bad” (attacker and C2) IP addresses.
- Detection and prevention of advanced threats from data center to mobile device, and starting this fall the endpoint. Our platform natively shares information about known and unknown threats across each capability via our next-generation threat intelligence cloud, and enforces the unified security policy across network and endpoint.
With these advantages, SOC analysts can lighten their workload, with fewer alerts and less manual correlation. Security operations management is happy, too: reduced resource loads mean fewer costs.
My congratulations to ST Electronics and Singapore for a well-planned program! We look forward to the fruits of the partnership. See some photos from the event below:
