COVID-19 has forced companies to break up and drift into a multitude of locations. A large enterprise gone all remote suddenly has a vast increase in edge locations to connect and secure. With many organizations planning to make work-from-home a staple moving forward, the sprawl will continue to pose a challenge.

Companies must become more aware of all of their many edge points and make intelligent choices about how to secure them, according to John Maddison (pictured), chief marketing officer and executive vice president of products at Fortinet Inc. “Now there’s [network edges] at home. … They had them at the branch office. They had them at the enterprise and the data center, in the cloud. Then they need to decide where to apply the security. Is it at the end point? Is it at the edges? Is it at the data center or cloud?” Maddison asked. 

Can anyone foresee the hairy problem of too many security point solutions getting even hairier at this point? The explosion of edge points must be secured through some sort of manageable, ideally centralized, solution, Maddison pointed out. It may not be possible to settle on one security solution, but a platform-security approach on top of a software-defined wide area network for connectivity can keep them to a sane minimum.

Maddison spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a CUBE Conversation at our studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how work-from-home is pushing companies to rethink network connectivity and edge security. (* Disclosure below.)

SD-WAN makes itself at home

SD-WAN is frequently used to spread network access throughout enterprise office locations, campuses, and such — but at home? This may sound like overkill to most people, but in the long term, homes will be part of the enterprise network just like any other edge locations, according to Maddison.

“SD-WAN is absolutely essential because every edge you have, whether it’s at home now, whether it be in your data center or on your campus or in the cloud, needs that SD-WAN technology to make sure you can guide the applications in a secure manner,” he said. 

As enterprises move and rearrange their workforces, another major question that looms is: How will they apply their security stack across all the different elements? The first step is to move as far away from discrete point solutions for individual issues as possible, according to Maddison.

The conversations he’s been having with organizations in recent years center on edge security complexity. “It’s just too hard to manage. I can’t find all the right people. I get so many alerts from so many security systems. I can’t work out what’s going on,” he said.

Companies should try to consolidate down to a platform or platforms that do all the work of their point solutions. Going from 30 vendors to one may be expecting too much, but five or six platforms for securing end points is within reason, Maddison added. This is how a single company and its security team can assure security for a huge number of end points.

“The platform allows you then to build automation. The automation allows you to see things more quickly and react to things more quickly and do things without manual intervention,” Maddison said. 

Fortinet recently announced it is offering its security training and education free of charge. The number of participants in its Network Security Expert training program went from 3,000 per week late last year to 80,000 per week at present, Maddison told theCUBE. The company also recently released its FortiOS network operating system 6.4 with over 300 new features, including new orchestration systems for SD-WAN. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE