Network Resilience Coalition Debuts to Boost Data and Network Security
The Futurum Group’s Ron Westfall assesses why the formation of the Network Resilience Coalition can advance improvements in the updating of hardware and software on a more consistent and systematic basis on a global basis, including supporting organizations in attaining the end-to-end visibility…
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The News: Industry organizations across networking, service providers, and cybersecurity announced the launch of the Network Resilience Coalition (NRC), an alliance focused on bringing together technology providers, security experts, and network operators seeking to develop real-world solutions that can significantly improve the security of data and networks that support global economic and national security. Read the Network Resilience Coalition press release here.
Network Resilience Coalition Debuts to Boost Data and Network Security
Analyst Take: Today we see hardware and software vendors exerting substantial effort and time to ensure the security and resilience of their offerings. However, many organizations lack robust patching and vulnerability management programs or fall behind at installing vital updates. As such, the hardware and software systems of organizations are frequently at risk.
Advisories from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and UK National Cyber Security Centre spotlight that bad actors, including state-sponsored activity, target aging network infrastructure, helping to fuel the ongoing surge in worldwide cyber-attacks.
The fallout costs from cybersecurity attacks are real and increasing. For example, the recently-released IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report identifies that the global average cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million, a 15% increase over 3 years. This year, it is projected that cyber-attacks can cause $6 trillion in damages and that the average cost of a ransomware attack is projected to reach $11.5 million during 2023 (both data points are according to Cybersecurity Ventures).
From my view, the founding members of the NRC, consisting of AT&T, Broadcom, BT Group, Cisco, Fortinet, Intel, Juniper, Lumen, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon, and VMware provide the global ecosystem and channel influence essential to swiftly broaden multi-organization collaboration as well as boosting industry-wide awareness. The diverse nature of the coalition including operators, chipmakers, security specialists, networking vendors, and hybrid cloud providers is key to assuring that improvements in vulnerability management as well as overall cybersecurity administration.
For instance, Cisco deftly used its annual Cisco Live 2023 event to announce its AI-driven Security Cloud solution, aimed primarily at empowering security teams to meet the expanding challenges of an increasingly intricate threat landscape by streamlining operations and boosting efficiency. Cisco’s multi-year investments in AI and machine learning (ML) played an integral role in the launch of Cisco Secure Access, Cisco’s new security service edge (SSE) solution.
As a result, I am encouraged to see the tech community collaborating to specifically address the nagging issue of updating hardware and software on a more consistent and systematic basis with the formation of the NRC. This includes supporting organizations in attaining end-to-end visibility to help improve network hardware and software resilience across their networks to better counter cyber risks. Ultimately, the coalition aims to globally improve network hardware and software resilience and better inform policy decision-making.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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