For any company that’s undergoing a digital transformation, there’s invariably an increasing element of cloud-based computing in the toolsets deployed. Very few organizations now rely on in-house applications and services for a significant part of their IT provision, unless it’s for exceptional reasons of specific security or secrecy.

As the majority of companies deploy more solutions as-a-service, the security posture of these organizations has to change accordingly. Perimeter-based defenses may still be important to protect users and remaining systems in the head office or data center, but as remote working becomes more popular and edge-based IoT and branch offices come online, there’s simply no perimeter in the traditional sense to protect.

Instead of perimeter-based hacking, bad actors are now targeting individuals in the business, with increasingly sophisticated phishing campaigns that can even mimic speech patterns in emails and messages. Users are tricked into visiting rogue sites whose URLs are carefully masked. Email, websites and remote document storage are now especially susceptible, because security teams don’t have the necessary tools or visibility to employ coherent security policies that reach from the individual end user to every cloud service and website visited.

In this changing threat landscape, where any link sent to an individual or any website visit from a user can deliver potentially crippling malware, security teams have been relying on mixed toolkits of older platforms such as proxy servers, VPNs, and gateway devices to attempt to keep users and their organizations safe. But these legacy systems rely on knowing the threat or assuming that there will be a first victim; thus they are outmoded, because they were never designed to protect in today’s cloud-first paradigm.

Menlo Security challenges the concept of ‘almost safe’

It doesn’t matter where users log in from—whether it’s a remote office, a customer site or public wi-fi. Users who access the internet through the Menlo Security Global Cloud Proxy platform built on an Isolation Core™ are completely safe and don’t need to worry about any malware ever reaching their device from any site on the internet. The Isolation Core™ separates users from the public web while providing employees with secure, low-latency connections to the internet and SaaS applications. It’s 100 percent effective because no active content ever gets executed on the endpoint device, thus nothing bad ever gets in.

Browse safely

Virtualized rendering engines in the Isolation Core™ at the heart of the Menlo Security solution parse each website the user accesses. In a virtual browser dedicated to each web user, the Global Cloud Proxy then fetches and executes all content in the cloud, away from the user, and renders only safe visuals of the website on the user’s device.

The granular nature of the solution’s capabilities can, additionally, let teams prevent access to specific sites or site types, like a traditional proxy solution. But unlike that older technology, the scalable AWS underpinning of the Menlo Security Global Cloud Proxy with an Isolation Core^TM means there’s never any latency in responsiveness of web browsing, due to the native elastic capabilities of AWS. End users continue to enjoy the native user experience they’re used to.

Furthermore, forms on pages designed to accept personal details can be rendered on the fly to be read-only—configuration and levels of protection are entirely up to company policy dictates. However they are configured, at the root of the solution is a Zero Trust Internet connection that protects seamlessly by providing ‘air-gap’ internet access for the enterprise.

Email protected

With no need to update blacklists and whitelists according to prevailing security information, users get email protection that goes well beyond the norm. In fact, Menlo Security eliminates all phishing, malware and ransomware attacks without needing to change email providers or in any way impeding users’ workflow.

With the Menlo Security Global Cloud Proxy, data leaks and credential theft after successful phishing attacks are a thing of the past, and the entire organization can communicate safely. Even the most sophisticated phishing attacks using personalized, accurate written styles that pick up on conversational key points are negated. The platform isolates all links and attachments in every email arriving at the user’s device, blocking theft and data exfiltration attempts before they can even start.

The safer online office

In today’s business environment, there are often multiple off-site data repositories mandated by the organization (and plenty more used on a personal basis by employees at all levels).

Data movements into these services (such as Dropbox, Box, Office 365, Google G Suite and so on) pass through the same platform as the business’s web traffic and email flows. That means it, too, is protected by Menlo Security’s Global Cloud Proxy under the same set of user-defined security policies that can be as broad-reaching or granular as required.

Conclusion

The APAC region has a worldwide reputation for leading the way in digital transformation in comparison to the European and American theaters. But in the haste that many are displaying to adopt cloud-first approaches to their IT, the security aspect of technology is often forgotten.

Despite every enterprise or company of any size throwing money at cybersecurity, there has been a tacit acceptance that ‘almost safe’ is good enough. That’s been the norm, until now! Menlo Security offers a way to transcend ‘almost safe’ to eliminate known and unknown malware, provide optimal performance to users, and gain greater visibility and control.

With security and data governance concerns baked into the platform, Menlo Security backs its solution with a $1M warranty against all malware, including ransomware, exploits and zero days. This $1M warranty is on the table to compensate any organization using its solution that suffers from a successful malware attack (including ransomware).

As companies embrace the cloud and adopt SaaS applications, they must transform their security to ensure that they are able to maintain the same security standards and policies. Other vendors have trained companies to believe that 100 percent security is unachievable. Menlo Security has taken a fundamentally different approach and proven them wrong by delivering security without compromise.

To learn more about the business case for isolation, click here or get in touch with a representative today.