Humans’ innate ability to communicate and collaborate may be one main cause of our success in attaining otherwise inaccessible goals. Throughout history, any major global challenge is best met with cooperation and collaboration.
Today’s global cyber threat challenge is no different. It is not simple to prevent intruders from penetrating an organization. Even the most security-conscious business remains at risk of an attack. With a cybersecurity landscape dominated by fragmented security vendors and tools, businesses struggle to protect themselves. Nobody can stop sophisticated cyber threats alone.
It takes a collaborative approach across cybersecurity vendors, managed security service providers (MSSP) and organizations to take up the global cyber threat challenge.
Cyber Threats Are a Global Challenge
Nobody escapes cyber threats completely. Today’s complex threat landscape, combined with the diversity and volume of network traffic in the modern customer environment, makes accurate and effective threat prevention very challenging. This problem is compounded by the challenge of detecting new, never-before-seen or zero-day malware and exploits, in addition to identifying and stopping known malicious content. Just like cybersecurity professionals are constantly looking for ways to develop better and more secure software programs, hackers are always staying on top of the newest updates to overcome the latest defenses.
Cooperation Beyond Borders Makes Hacking More Difficult and Less Lucrative
Organizations like the Cyber Threat Alliance, co-founded by Palo Alto Networks in 2014, are taking cyber threat information sharing to a new level in hopes that it will lead to better protection for the public against cyber attacks. In essence, this not-for-profit organization is working to improve the cybersecurity of our global digital ecosystem by encouraging collaboration between cybersecurity organizations, enabling near real-time, high-quality cyber threat information sharing amongst members and with the world.
Another example of cooperation in cybersecurity is Unit 42, the Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence team. This group of cybersecurity researchers and industry experts use data collected by the company's security platform to discover new cyber threats, such as new forms of malware and malicious actors operating across the world. The group runs a popular blog where they post technical reports analyzing active threats and adversaries. Their work includes recent information on how to protect against threat actors who are taking advantage of COVID-19 with new cyber threats.
In addition, public contributions from cybersecurity vendors are essential to providing vulnerability protections. On this note, Palo Alto Networks is a regular contributor to vulnerability research in Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Android and other ecosystems. By proactively identifying vulnerabilities, developing protections for our customers, and sharing them for patching, we help enterprises, government and service provider networks be less compromised by attackers.
Collaborative Partnerships with MSSPs Lead the Way to More Secure Organizations
The nature of current cybersecurity challenges requires partners collaborating to help resolve problems effectively. For many organizations, teaming up with MSSPs to fight attackers with best practices becomes the best choice.
Similarly, for those MSSPs, it is critical to partner and collaborate with the right cybersecurity vendor to bring excellence to their defence teams. This enables them to deliver the best strategy to help organizations remain secure.
Collaboration is in the DNA of Palo Alto Networks. Throughout our portfolio of security products and services, collaboration is what it takes to offer consistent security across network, branch, data center and mobile users. It’s also one of our company values, and it is reflected in the way employees work every day.
Palo Alto Networks not only delivers best-in-class security but also brings collaboration with MSSP partners to offer profitable and agile services through an engagement framework. This framework is grounded in basic principles of organizational communication, teamwork, trust and relationship building. From service creation to support, from deployment to Day 2 operations, from sales and marketing to campaigns, Palo Alto Networks offers our MSSP partners true partnership. Ultimately, collaborative partnerships are key to improving organizations’ security posture, avoiding the far greater costs of an ill-prepared cyber response strategy.
Collaboration to Stop Cyber Threats
Cybersecurity is all about guarding businesses from the increasing dangers of persistent threats with a cooperative model.
Although there is no “silver bullet” to address the diverse and persistent nature of cyber threats, an enhanced collaboration across cybersecurity organizations, vendors and MSSPs presents a great opportunity to create a more effective and cohesive cybersecurity strategy to ultimately prevent and stop cyber attacks.
Learn more about how Palo Alto Networks collaborates with MSSPs to address the global cyber threat challenge.
This post is part of a series on MSSP partners.