Palo Alto focuses on prevention based architecture to solve customer's security challenges

Palo Alto focuses on prevention based architecture to solve customer’s security challenges  

In a chat with VARINDIA, Harpreet Bhatia, Director – Channel & Strategic Alliances India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks discusses about the company’s approach towards its customers and the challenges its customers are facing presently  

With a focus on prevention based architecture and solve customer’s challenges, Palo Alto empowers its customers in an integrated and automated manner. As digitalization is gradually sweeping over the entire country the customers are evolving and they are steadily moving into the cloud. At the same time cyber criminals are using the similar tools to strike an attack and to prevent it the security tools has to be automated, integrated and scalable to respond to adversary.   

“Palo Alto Networks as an organization is focused on prevention based architecture to solve our customers’ toughest security challenges and we do this in an integrated and automated manner across all the three variants of an Enterprise, which means network, endpoint and cloud. Due to the rapid digitalization our customers are going through an evolution and they are rapidly moving on to the cloud. They are rapidly automating and using the power of analytics to enhance their business and stay one step ahead in the competition. Our adversary, the bad guys on the other hand are also using the power of cloud and lot of automation to mount new to newer attacks. And so the security apparatus has to change which means our response as security organization has to be highly automated, integrated and scalable to respond to adversary. That’s what Palo Alto Networks doing. We are a company that does not only sell products but also solves our customers’ toughest business challenges,” explains Harpreet Bhatia, Director – Channel & Strategic Alliances India & SAARC, Palo Alto Networks.

Further he adds, “Palo Alto Networks as an organization is on a mission, and that mission is to protect our way of life in this digital age by preventing successful cyber attacks. This mission is very bold statement because, what we are trying to do is, protect our way of life against our highly automated adversary by deploying a preventive based mechanism in an automated and integrated fashion to fight this adversary.”

Challenges

Discussing about the challenges that a customer faces, Harpreet elaborates, “Some of the challenges are - first, the challenge of visibility. What is happening on the network endpoint? What threats are traversing on the cloud should be known to our customers. We are providing them complete visibility across their entire enterprise architect. Second, we prevent known threats. Though most of the other organizations do that, ours is extremely integrated on to what carries the threat. For example, the threat factor today is applications. So our known threats are actually built on layer seven, which identifies them.

The third challenge is how to prevent unknown threats. So we have built an APT engine in our platform which allows us to deploy preventive mechanism within five minutes or convert unknown threat to known threat within five minutes of being identified. Last but not the least, we gave single pen of view across the network, endpoint and cloud for ease of manageability to our customers. And all these data of our customers is actually fed upon into our Threat Intelligence Cloud which is completely built on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to push back preventive solutions into the network and endpoint cloud site. This Threat Intelligence Cloud is possibly one of the biggest repositories of threat intelligence data, also carries threat intelligence from 54000+ customers globally. The threat intelligence which we have observed all across is shared amongst all our customers and preventive mechanism is also deployed all amongst our customers. So if threat is observed in the U.S then at the same time the preventive mechanism will be deployed across our customers in India also, which means, threat intelligence sharing on such a big platform is seamlessly possible. That’s why we are saying this is an integrated and automated approach.”

The company is also making innovations in security by making the threat intelligence data accessible to third parties to develop new solutions.   

“Not only this, Palo Alto Networks is evolving into making security innovations, which are going to come in the future, become extremely accessible to our customers. We have opened threat intelligence data to third parties and other innovative companies who are developing certain innovative solutions on security. We have opened our APIs to these organizations to come and develop solutions which can be deployed across our network endpoint and end cloud platforms. The advantage will be to our customers who can now consume security innovations at a very first pace. Already, 50+ organisations have signed up into this, there are 30+ products in bita testing on the way. So in all our approach is completely towards prevention architecture and in a fully integrated and automated fashion,” describes Harpreet.