Redefining Visibility & Control from Campus to Cloud

Twitter: @RobhGreer

Sasha: I’m Sasha Casas here with Rob Greer, our Senior Vice President of Products and Chief Marketing Officer at Forescout.

We recently made some exciting announcements regarding product enhancements to Forescout CounterACT®. Before we dig in, Rob can you set the foundation for us for the problems that customers are currently experiencing in the marketplace today?

Rob: It took us 25 years to get to five billion IP-connected devices. And over the next three years, we’re going to go to 30 billion. At least that’s what the analysts are saying. And we’re seeing it in our install base. With the influx of those devices, customers don’t know what’s connected. What we’re seeing is the bad guys coming in, going through those devices and causing havoc. We’ve heard about it in the news. Breaches, outages. And that’s really what we’re here to do is shine a light on those devices and allow our customers to have a chance at determining what should and should not be connected.

Sasha: Let’s focus on the announcements that we just released. What were the highlights?

Rob: This is probably the most exciting release that we’ve had. It’s focused on three areas.

We’re extending our visibility and control deeper into the data center, specifically the software-defined data center. It extends our theme that we announced a few months back around illuminating what’s connecting in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This recent announcement is specifically around the private cloud.
The second key area is around creating a better out-of-box experience for identifying or classifying IoT (Internet of Things) devices in the environment. Customers really want something that’s easy to use, out of the box and doesn’t require expensive people with unique skills to be able to manage it.
The last piece is around improving our overall enterprise resiliency. That comes in the form of extending scale to over a million devices under management.

Sasha: Let’s dig into each one a little bit more. First, tell us about this consolidated visibility across the network.

Rob: Forescout has been focusing on the campus networks for the majority of our existence. Up until just a few months back when we announced our AWS visibility capabilities, which is an infrastructure as a service – a public cloud service – we were going along the path of taking the visibility control of just the campus, like our office building, to the data center, cloud, as well as operational technology environments.

“Our vision is to take, in essence, everything a customer cares about that’s connecting, whether virtual or physical, and allow them to see it first, and then apply controls to it.”

What’s really new here is deeper integration with VMware. VMware has an amazing product called NSX, which is their micro-segmentation technology that allows customers to take action given some sort of event. We provide the context around what is coming up in the virtual data center. And if those virtual machines are not compliant, or are doing something they shouldn’t, we can share that information with VMware NSX and they can take controls.

Sasha: Impressive. Next, the out-of-the-box IoT device classification taxonomy and templates. Tell us more about that.

Rob: Out of the box, when you put in CounterACT, we will not just identify that there is, for example, a Siemens device, connecting to your network. We’re going to also articulate: it’s made by Google, it’s a Nest and it belongs in this type of vertical. The customer will be able to see that automatically in our inventory view, so they can immediately drop policies for that. What we’re doing, in essence, is creating a taxonomy that is modernizing the way companies should be looking at the devices connecting to their environment.

Sasha: Last but not least, tell us more about the enterprise scale and resiliency piece.

Rob: What we’ve done is enabled our product to scale to over a million devices.
A few of our customers today are deployed with over a million devices under management, and this is something we’re going to continue to invest in over time as more and more devices enter the enterprise.

But not just that, the resiliency side has been another big investment for us. Our customers rely so much on our product to be a platform that can see and control everything in their environment. If our products fail due to a power outage or hardware failure, if they’re running on one of our physical appliances, we’ve now given them the option of what we call “failover cluster.” What that allows them to do is designate one or more existing appliances that are running to be a failover option for other appliances in the environment

Sasha: What an impressive suite of enhancements and exciting for our customers. Thank you for giving us the deep dive.

For more information, check out:

Capterized playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2HYJud3zBqeNI3-a8PbEGB8QSaVppiVu

CounterACT enhancements press release: https://www.forescout.com/company/news/press-release/forescout-extends-agentless-visibility-classification-and-control-across-campus-data-center-and-cloud/

VMware press release: https://www.forescout.com/company/news/press-release/forescout-unveils-new-security-solution-vmware-software-defined-data-center-environments/