Nearly 10 years ago, a number of security professionals presented a new approach to cybersecurity called “adaptive security.” Gartner, SANS, and Sun Microsystems began highlighting adaptive security, which was envisioned as a new way to protect businesses as the traditional network perimeter became less relevant. Enterprises were beginning to adopt cloud services, software-defined infrastructure and mobile computing, resulting in applications and data being exposed to a dynamic, evolving set of threats. These trends required security to be automated and capable of changing on demand based on context to improve security decisions.
Today Gartner continues to emphasize adaptive security as a top strategic technology trend for enterprises. Enterprises face sophisticated cyber-attacks that force them to play constant defense using a patchwork of security tools.
Adaptive security addresses these challenges without relying on traditional blocking and prevention measures and is now able to leverage exciting advancements in application architecture, data instrumentation, and advanced analytics. Here are three innovations enabling the new model for enterprise security: