A Record $2.5 Trillion in Mergers Were Announced in the First Half of 2018 alone 1. Why this one is different.
Imagine you woke up to a day without traffic lights, public transportation, access to your money, power or clean water. While it would be extremely disruptive not to have these critical elements to us personally, local infrastructure interruptions like this can be felt globally in our increasingly connected world. We have all heard about the cyberattacks that have potential to impact the most critical operations in any industry – whether it is infrastructure, or data centers of global financial firms, or vital healthcare delivery systems.
Our largest customers managing critical infrastructure have asked us to help them mitigate their business risk and help protect against disruption from these unknown threats.
Here is what’s happening. In the so-called ‘connected world’ of critical infrastructure, the technologies that run these services are on networks. While there are great benefits to running on the network, there are huge safety and security risks. What can be done to protect against these risks:
- The more you see, the more you can secure.
- Increasing compliance leads to increased safety.
- Segmentation can protect the network and devices.
- The faster you can detect and respond to an incident, the faster the risk will be mitigated.
Let’s get back to why this acquisition matters. While the above sounds simple it is difficult to achieve. SecurityMatters brings a complementary set of capabilities to our existing visibility and response solutions by offering the ability to quickly identify and recover from threats which is key for critical infrastructure’s operational continuity. Today, few operations and security personnel know everything that’s on their networks – together we can help protect their critical assets and help them gain confidence in knowing what is safe and what is exposed.
The acquisition of SecurityMatters will enable Forescout to achieve its vision by:
- Providing deeper visibility into OT and ICS environments. With SecurityMatters as a part of the Forescout platform, granular details can now be gathered about OT and ICS devices at the lowest levels. These devices no longer provide security exposure from unknown devices with unknown hygiene.
- Delivering end-to-end OT risk awareness and compliance management.
The granular asset intelligence that SecurityMatters provides from devices such as PLCs and sensors integrates with Forescout’s regulatory and device compliance capabilities to make sure that the risk profile and compliance state is known and reportable in real-time. - Enabling dynamic network segmentation across the entire enterprise. By identifying and classifying OT network traffic, SecurityMatters will help Forescout extend its segmentation and policy orchestration vision to OT devices and networks. With this added intelligence, decisions can be made how to isolate and protect critical assets without the added overhead in maintaining that segmentation.
- Automating rapid detection and incident response for OT. When OT began connecting to the internet, it opened Pandora’s box of internet security threats. If incidents occur from unpatched IT devices or from a malware-infected USB plugged into an OT device, the combined SecurityMatters’ detection engine for ICS-specific indicators and behavioral anomalies with Forescout’s IT context perception and security orchestration provide a unified front for a comprehensive response.
Existing solutions are limited in their ability to address the breadth and depth of unique cyber risk challenges OT. The combined solution of Forescout and SecurityMatters brings value beyond cyber security by providing visibility and control across the extended enterprise. We are looking forward to bringing the expanded capabilities and advanced features to secure OT and industrial environments.
Watch the video to learn what our leaders are saying about the acquisition here.
Additional Information:
www.forescout.com
1The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/business/dealbook/mergers-record-levels.html
