Networks

The last decade has been challenging for the cyber industry. Attackers always seem to have the upper hand while defenders play catch up. It’s common to point to the ever-accelerating frequency and sophistication of attacks, siloed security that creates gaps, and a shortage of skilled cyber professionals as rationale for this lagging position. All are true but none represent the core reason for our current situation.

Organizations no longer keep their data in one centralized location. Users and assets responsible for processing data may be located outside the network, and may share information with third-party vendors who are themselves removed from those external networks. The Zero Trust approach addresses this situation by treating every user, asset, and application as a potential attack vector whether it is authenticated or not.

Modern organizations face a wide and constantly changing range of network security threats, and security leaders must constantly update their security posture against them. As threat actors change their tactics, techniques, and procedures, exploit new vulnerabilities, and deploy new technologies to support their activities — it’s up to security teams to respond by equipping themselves with solutions that address the latest threats.

Network vulnerability scanning provides in-depth insight into your organization’s security posture and highlights the specific types of vulnerabilities attackers may exploit when targeting it. These tools work by systematically scanning your network environment — including all desktops, laptops, mobile endpoints, servers, and other assets for known weaknesses and misconfigurations. Your analyzer then produces a detailed report that tells you exactly how hackers might breach your systems.

NetBox Labs, is the open-source startup behind NetBox, a tool designed specifically for network engineers and operators. It combines the functionalities of IP Address Management (IPAM) and Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) into a unified solution. With this relationship, Forward Enterprise and NetBox Cloud customers: The relationship includes a joint effort to build a bi-directional integration between Forward Enterprise and NetBox.

Generative AI (à la OpenAI’s GPT and the likes) is a powerful tool for summarizing information, transformations of text, transformation of code, all while doing so using its highly specialized ability to “speak” in a natural human language. While working with GPT APIs on several engineering projects an interesting idea came up in brainstorming, how well would it work when asked to describe information provided in raw JSON into natural language?

Network Change Management (NCM) is the process of planning, testing, and approving changes to a network infrastructure. The goal is to minimize network disruptions by following standardized procedures for controlled network changes. NCM, or network configuration and change management (NCCM), is all about staying connected and keeping things in check. When done the right way, it lets IT teams seamlessly roll out and track change requests, and boost the network’s overall performance and safety.

As more organizations collectively progress toward adopting a SASE architecture, it has become clear that the traditional SASE market definition (SSE + SD-WAN) is not enough. It forces some teams to work with multiple vendors to address their specific needs, introducing performance and security tradeoffs. More worrisome, it draws focus more to a checklist of services than a vendor’s underlying architecture.

At Cato our number one goal has always been to simplify networking and security, we even wrote it on a cake once so it must be true: Figure 1 – A birthday cake Applying this principle to our XDR offering, we aimed at reducing the complexity of analyzing security and network incidents, using a data-driven approach that is based on the vast amounts of data we see across our global network and collect into our data lake.