Verify and Validate Zero Trust Architecture

With the constant rise of modern cyber threats, many businesses are aiming for zero-trust infrastructure to keep themselves and their customers safe. But a zero-trust environment, where only authorized people can access information and resources, is often more difficult to implement than anticipated. If security teams and network engineers cannot visualize the network and its […]

With the constant rise of modern cyber threats, many businesses are aiming for zero-trust infrastructure to keep themselves and their customers safe. But a zero-trust environment, where only authorized people can access information and resources, is often more difficult to implement than anticipated. If security teams and network engineers cannot visualize the network and its possible traffic paths and behaviors, they can’t possibly secure the environment.

Forward Enterprise is designed to collect detailed config and state information on the entire network and then help engineers visualize, verify, search, predict and understand diffs following change windows. This information is invaluable to companies seeking to implement zero trust as it provides detailed connectivity information in a way that is easy to consume and act upon. We’ve recently added three new features to Forward Enterprise, that curate critical security information making it easy to understand device connectivity and potential vulnerabilities.

Regardless of how large or complicated a network is, Forward Enterprise empowers IT to improve network operations and avoid outages. This is thanks to its unique mathematical model that creates a digital twin of the network, allowing network operators to map all possible traffic flows, verify intent, predict network behavior, and more.

Our platform also helps security operations professionals with new visualizations of East-West traffic flows, endpoint-to-endpoint connectivity analysis matrices, and timely non-compliance alerts. These new features for Forward Enterprise make security teams’ lives easier by simplifying and streamlining traditionally labor-intensive network processes.

Blast Radius Identification

Today it is not a question of “if” a device will be compromised – but “when.” During an attack, it is critical that security operations professionals immediately identify the full impact of compromised devices so that they can contain the threat. With Forward’s blast radius, security teams can now identify the full exposure and reach of a compromised host with a single mouse click, making isolation and remediation a much simpler and faster process.

Zone-to-Zone Connectivity Posture

Having full insight into how and where devices and applications communicate over the network is fundamental to security. And yet this is one of the most difficult security tasks to perform, with most teams working from out-of-date spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to try and figure things out manually. Unsurprisingly, this is incredibly inefficient and error-prone.

But with Forward Enterprise correlating routing information and security policies, security teams can now easily see how their security posture is enacted on the network. With a graphical matrix that clearly delineates which zones have full connectivity, partial connectivity or no connectivity, security operations professionals can have full confidence of their zone-to-zone connectivity posture.

Network OS Vulnerability Identification

Trying to stay ahead of the unending stream of network device OS vulnerability alerts can be a full-time job – but it does not have to be. Forward Enterprise now uses the latest information from the NIST National Vulnerability Database, along with specific device and configuration data collected from your network, to automatically recognize and flag potential network OS vulnerabilities. Security teams can save time and stress with proactive vulnerabilities updates presented in an easily actionable format.

To see these security features in action, please request a demo.

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Fabrizio Maccioni

Fabrizio Maccioni is the Director of Technical Marketing at Forward Networks. Fabrizio focuses on Network Device Programmability, Automation, and Application Hosting.