How channel partners can move end customers away from yesterday's failed security solutions towards future proofed Deterministic Protection

Bobby Gupta, SVP & MD, Virsec

Traditional security solutions are using a legacy approach towards protection and detection which has reached the end of its life, explains Virsec’s Bobby Gupta, SVP & MD, International Business prompting the need to adopt a new approach around Deterministic Protection.

Security practitioners are exhausted at the failed promise of protection when many vendors merely offer alerts after an attack on their applications. As we have seen with Log4j, PrintNightmare, and other recent attacks, this approach is not working.

Attacks continue to increase exponentially. In 2020, the FBI saw more than 2,000 ransomware incidents, and more than a 200% jump in ransom demands in 2021. Software vulnerabilities continue to plague legacy and modern systems and the commonality among these events is that they target, and in many cases hide within software at its fundamental levels on hosts and in memory. 

OWASP has updated its top ten most critical risks to applications and added a new category, software and data integrity failures. Since attackers are constantly changing their techniques, traditional tools do not protect against the attack-of-the-week anymore.

Deterministic Protection
A new approach is to use Deterministic Protection, which can determine what your software is supposed to do and immediately stop any attack. Deterministic Protection secures the full-application stack, web, host, and memory, at runtime, regardless of application type or environment. This deterministic approach to security ensures protection for legacy unpatched workloads, consolidated VMs and containers, and provides runtime web application protection and application control. 

Deterministic Protection ensures better protection against known and unknown threats to software workloads and reduces threat actor dwell time from minutes to milliseconds. It combines the broadest attack coverage and highest accuracy in the industry and protects server workloads across the entire runtime stack, eliminating false positives, when deployed on bare metal, virtual machines, containers, or in the cloud.

This is the next evolution from eradicating threats to software workload using runtime in real-time. Deterministic Protection makes security response obsolete by improving the protection that conventional, probabilistic solutions simply cannot.

Tips for channel partners 
Servers are the crown jewels in an organization. And it is important to have Deterministic Protection installed in all the servers especially the ones which are the most critical and vulnerable. It is important to deploy Deterministic Protection in any server environment where organization runs a risk of a reputation loss or any kind of monetary loss if they get breached.

One of the key benefits that channel partners can transfer to their end customers recognitions is reduction of operational expenses after deployment of Deterministic Protection since the false positives is close to zero. The ease of deployment and configuration of a Deterministic Protection solution is appreciated by end customers even in complex environments. 

Deterministic Protection can be implemented by certified channel partners. This is an on-premises solution, which is platform agnostic and can support bare metal, virtualized, cloud, containers or a hybrid environment. All of this can be managed though a single on-premises user interface console deployed in the customer environment.

Another plus point while implementing Detection and Protection is that it is fully automated with minimal to no human intervention. Most other conventional security solutions rely on a scoring mechanism to look for the bad and require human intervention to take protection action. This makes the protection limited to human intelligence and becomes a bottleneck to detect and protect from Zero-days on time. 

Deterministic Protection’s automated approach removes this dependency and is able to protect instantaneously with precision. The coverage for all of these use cases helps organizations achieve better protection, reduces cost of operations, and ensures continual compliance, aiding overall business outcomes.