With the enterprise landscape changing rapidly, it is no longer enough to build a fortress to keep and protect every piece of data inside it. More people are working remotely, more data flows through the cloud, and less of it ever traverses a corporate network. It’s the lack of visibility that makes all of this information hard to keep track of and ensure it stays secure, especially when others have bad intentions. An agile and constantly innovative technology, with a broader reach, is needed to safeguard sensitive corporate data, wherever it resides, and stay ahead of bad adversaries.

With the recent rise in cyberattacks, services and products that are essential to everyday lives are increasingly being disrupted. A robust cloud data security solution is vital in minimizing the impacts, as is storing data in remote locations, which provides better protection for businesses against the threat of data loss.

Recently awarded the 2020 Stratus Award in the “Best Cloud Security Service” category,  McAfee MVISION Unified Cloud Edge was recognized for simplifying the adoption of Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. McAfee MVISION UCE combines the industry’s leading cloud access security broker (CASB), Cloud Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with unified cloud management to deliver a direct-to-web-and-cloud architecture via the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework.

What is Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)?

Leading research and advisory company Gartner, defines  SASE as a security framework that prescribes the conversion of security and network connectivity technologies into a single cloud-delivered platform to enable secure and fast cloud transformation. The SASE framework is designed to allow enterprise security professionals to apply identity and context to specify the exact level of performance, reliability, security, and cost desired for every network session.

By using the SASE framework, organizations can address new security challenges, while achieving increased speed and greater scale in the cloud. With users working outside a controlled office environment and operating on personal devices or company-owned devices from home, and using personal or public networks, it is imperative to have a uniform high-standard threat defense, rather than a mess vulnerable to attack and abuse.

According to Gartner, SASE is expected to be adopted by 40% of large enterprises by 2024, up from “less than 1% at year-end 2018,” showing SASE’s importance in data and enterprise security.

Implementing a SASE architecture benefits enterprises, as it lowers costs and complexities, reduces risk exposure when enabling new digital business scenarios (apps, services, APIs), makes data shareable to partners and contractors, and provides better performance and latency. There are also boosts for ease of use and transparency, the ability to enable a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and allow network access based on the identity of the user, device and application, along with benefits to network security staff by shifting their focus to strategic projects and away from threat identification. Additionally, organizations can map business, regulatory, and application access requirements to SASE capabilities and centralize policy with local enforcement.

The MVISION Cloud met 97% of Gartner’s required criteria for enterprise-class production use and scored 100% for meeting the requirements in the architecture, adaptive access control (AAC), threat protection, user and entity behavior analysis (UEBA), cloud security posture management (CSPM), management and operation, and reverse-proxy-supported cloud apps categories.

MVISION Cloud can be used in a variety of environments – from cloud-based to on-premise only, in a hybrid or multi-cloud topology. It can be applied to your existing secure access service edge (SASE) architecture or integrated with the McAfee MVISION portfolio, including the award-winning remote browser isolation (RBI) capabilities in McAfee Unified Cloud Edge (UCE). The Annual 2021 IT World Awards® presented RBI with a silver Globee® award in the “Hot technology of the year” category.  Constant innovation is critical in the cat and mouse game in the world of cybersecurity. The MITRE ATT&CK® Framework is a prime example of cutting-edge technology in cybersecurity, and the downloadable paper provides an insight into the opportunities for improving not only cloud security but cloud adoption overall.

When it comes to protecting data, it is better to counter threats and eliminate them before they can create damage. A unified and seamless defense strategy across users, devices, networks, and the cloud benefits everyone in the organization. When the battlefield is invisible and distributed, it pays to keep every attack surface as protected as possible. After all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

To learn more about the MVISION solution stack with cloud access security brokerage at its core, as well as other class-leading technologies, get in touch with a representative from McAfee Enterprise today