“Where’s your app? Where’s your data?” For a long time, if you needed to know where your applications or data were, the answer was clear: it was always either on-premises or in a branch. Universally, almost regardless of organization size, infrastructures were contained, and visible within a defined boundary—you have a data center, a network, a branch, a user.

Around 20 years ago I had the privilege of joining a young company that invented the Firewall – Check Point. I learned most of my networking knowledge and skills at Check Point and, at that time, I was involved in the high end, rapidly evolving internet. This might be the reason why I truly believe that network security must be a layer in the overall security strategy. A few years ago, I came back to Check Point as a cloud security product manager.

Customers often ask me: What is the difference between Zero Trust and SASE? My answer is almost always the same: Nothing….and, everything. Both have taken the industry by storm over the last couple of years, and even more so with the security and access demands on the business driven by the existing remote workforce, but both have different implementation approaches. It is important to understand, however, that one does not fully provide the other; in fact, they reinforce each other.

As IT and security leaders adapt to business operations in the “new normal,” they are simultaneously being charged with priming the business to win in the next era of distributed computing. This involves myriad updates to the business’ IT systems, and in some cases, a comprehensive overhaul for network modernization, cloud migration, and edge design and deployment — all tightly wrapped with security.

If you don’t know the state of your network, you’re like a blind pilot, inevitably headed for disaster. Fortunately, the market now offers many good software solutions, both commercial and open source, for network monitoring.

SD-WAN and MPLS are two technologies that are often perceived as either-or solutions. For many organizations, however, SD-WAN and MPLS can complement each other. This article will define and compare the technologies, explaining how, in many cases, they work together. We’ll also explore SD-WAN’s popularity and its role in enabling modern security architectures like SASE.

SMB stands for Server Message Block, once known as Common Internet File System, is a communication protocol for providing shared access between systems on a network. At a high level, it is a set of rules adopted to share files, printers in a network. SMB is a file sharing protocol that involves computers communicating with each other in a local network. This local network could be a small business within the same office or a multi-national company with offices around the globe connected to each other.

Network operations teams rely on highly specialized tools developed by individual vendors designed to address particular problems. The result? Most enterprises have 10+ Network Operations applications in place and they don’t talk to each other—which means that network operations engineers spend an exhaustive and unnecessary amount of time toggling between applications and sifting through information as they work to resolve tickets.

From exposing your network vulnerabilities to becoming a passageway for intruders, open ports can pose several risk vectors that threaten your network’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This is why it’s a best practice to close your open ports. To tackle the risks introduced by open ports, network admins rely on port scanning tools to identify, inspect, analyze, and close open ports in their networks.