ForeScout reveals its enhanced device visibility platform to expand visibility across the extended enterprise, including operational technology and critical infrastructure
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – ForeScout Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: FSCT), a leading Internet of Things (IoT) security company, urges Middle East based organizations to implement a visibility-first approach to security.
Speaking on the sidelines of the IDC CISO Roundtable, held today at Dubai’s Burj Al Arab hotel, Hamed Diab, director of METCA, ForeScout, said geopolitical tensions are driving demand for comprehensive visibility across Middle East’s hyperconnected enterprises.
“Government departments and major corporations face unprecedented risks of being hacked and hit with malware,” he said.
“As the volume and diversity of IoT devices proliferate organizations and governments invest in ‘smart cities’ for their citizens, ForeScout is helping its clients stay ahead of the curve by offering comprehensive visibility across their networks. You cannot secure what you cannot see.”
Today, more than 166 IoT projects are running in Saudi Arabia and the UAE alone. As new ‘smart’ cities are built, and new technology installed, massive networks and datacenters will be created to support them – and the immense security challenges they present may be overlooked. In the last year, organizations have had to keep pace with the rapid growth of devices while managing security hygiene and compliance. Companies are discovering up to 60 percent2 more devices on their network than previously known with an increasing majority that cannot support management and security agents. Threat actors have also begun to exploit the expanded attack surface represented by non-traditional IoT and operational technology (OT) devices as entry points into the enterprise.
ForeScout’s expansion in the Middle East comes at a critical time for the region. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and United Arab Emirates have embarked on ambitious plans for economic reform. Rapid private-sector growth offers new investment opportunities in key sectors such as real estate, construction, tourism and manufacturing, but the sheer scale and pace of change means new security gaps are appearing at a dramatic rate.
“The industry has a massive visibility problem that is only growing as the number of corporate unmanaged IP-connected devices continues to explode,” continues Diab. “When it comes to the extended enterprise, it just takes one rogue or invisible device to take down an entire network. Our platform provides a visibility-first approach to secure the campus to cloud to critical infrastructure and helps enterprises light up all of their devices regardless of if they have one hundred or one million.”
In mid-2016, ForeScout opened a base in Dubai, its first in the Middle East and Africa. Starting with a single employee, it soon expanded and today it has numerous partners across the region, in sectors as diverse as oil and gas, government, finance, healthcare, and defense.
ForeScout Unveils Upgraded Device Cloud Expands Device Visibility Platform
Today, ForeScout announced new foundational innovations in ForeScout CounterACT® 8 that raise the bar on device visibility and control to mitigate risk, reduce the attack surface and automate incident response across the extended enterprise network – from the campus to data center, cloud and critical infrastructure. The enhanced ForeScout device visibility platform adds increased scalability, cloud-based device intelligence, IoT device assessment and flexible centralized licensing to help enterprises see and control more than five billion IP-connected devices, including traditional, mobile, virtual, IoT and operational technology (OT).
ForeScout has expanded its device visibility platform to deliver the following key features and benefits:
Expanded device visibility: The platform now provides better insight into some of the fastest growing enterprise devices, including industrial and critical infrastructure systems, IPv6 addressable devices and devices managed by cloud controllers such as Cisco Meraki.
Increased device intelligence: Launched in July 2017, the ForeScout Device Cloud has grown to be one of the largest crowd-sourced device repositories in the world, now housing more than three million enterprise devices from more than 500 customers that share anonymized device insight. ForeScout’s platform uses the data to analyze device types and publish new and improved device profiles for better auto-classification. Additionally, ForeScout’s platform now includes a new IoT risk assessment capability that allows organizations to identify devices with default or weak credentials and automate policy actions to ensure compliance and mitigate risks. Lastly, the device visibility platform adds new passive-only discovery and profiling to provide organizations with real-time OT and industrial device inventory without introducing operational risk or impacting reliability.
Improved scalability and deployment: Improved management scale from one million to two million devices per single deployment allows enterprises to keep pace with device growth. They can also optimize rack space and data center utilization by managing up to 20,000 devices on a single 1U appliance with full 10Gbps traffic monitoring. A new virtual deployment option includes KVM support, in addition to VMware and Hyper-V. The new auto IP-allocation feature allows customers to automate IP distribution and management across a multi-appliance cluster and reduce manual administrative tasks.
Flexible purchasing and deployment options: New ForeScout Flexx licensing provides customers choice and simplifies portability and entitlement management by enabling them to purchase ForeScout’s CounterACT and Enterprise Manager platform as a centralized software license.
