The number of cybersecurity incidents has doubled since the pandemic and its costing organizations exorbitantly heavy tolls in direct and indirect losses, according to the International Monetary Fund of the United Nations. Close to a million companies are getting impacted by targeted cyberattacks each year.

The hasty implementation of the hybrid work model overnight blurred the lines of the perimeter giving rise to a “borderless network”. This is a tad tricky to keep fenced from external threats as remote users often connect from public networks that are unsafe and open to bad actors. And with today’s volume, traffic is ridiculously hard to monitor and manage. These and other factors make every digital interaction in the distributed landscape a potential risk.

SonicWall saw this coming a long time. “What we had started seeing in 2019 is this collection of security tools that were built one on top of the other – which in hindsight looks pretty neat – but once you look at the connectivity from the user to the application, you see that it’s a ball of spaghetti,” said Tarun Desikan, executive vice president. “After COVID hit, small businesses to big companies, all started getting hacked using these very tools that they built.”

A three-decade-old startup, SonicWall is working to stop cyber-gangs from targeting remote users and gaining easy passage into protected digital environments. Its latest rollout, Cloud Secure Edge (CSE), is a Security Service Edge (SSE) solution that delivers “risk-based connectivity and protection” by placing security closer to the edge.

SonicWall gained recognition in the cybersecurity niche for championing several genre-busting ideas. The company deals with distributed environments where aside from a physical footprint, typically companies have a bevy of workers and contractors operating remotely and at times from the office.

Desikan predicted, “If the type of user profile keeps changing and you have more and more remote workers, your operations are going to get really complicated. Managing policies across all these systems will be hard, and your user experience is going to be bad because your users, when they’re in the office, have to do one thing, and when they go home, have to do something else. Worst of all, the security model will break down.”

Besides being rife with complex operations and poor levels of user experience, the older security model also has some serious loopholes which opened up wide and deep as the hybrid work model took effect.

SonicWall is trying to fix that with the launch of Cloud Secure Edge. Expanded by Banyan Security’s technology, CSE aims to replace the crumbling pre-pandemic time model with one that is purpose-built, proactive and risk-based.

CSE tightly connects the users and the devices where they are with the resources across physical distances, said Desikan, while showcasing the solution at the recent Security Field Day, a Tech Field Day event, in California.

“It’s an identity-centric system as opposed to a network-centric system,” he said. “You can build an identity-centric system that connects users and devices where they are – in the office, or in a remote location – to whatever resource they need to do their job. The resource could be on premise, running in a data center, in a public cloud or SaaS or it could be just on the internet.”

When users send a request to connect to an application or resource, CSE passes it through stringent security checks for authentication. CSE works through a client installed on the user device that postures that device and establishes connectivity. A Dynamic Cloud Edge running in the cloud connects to the location nearest to the user before directing it to a SaaS console, Cloud Command Center, where risk is evaluated, user attributes and device posture are calculated, and routing decisions are made according to the defined policies.

SonicWall also supports clientless scenarios in which the browser serves as the application, informed Desikan.

The standout capability of Cloud Secure Edge, according to Desikan, is trust scoring. The platform is capable of analyzing and contextualizing risks associated with a user or a device as opposed to making a static positive or negative determination.

“It is not just hey, this is Tarun, he’s accessing an application. It’s Tarun on a trusted device that’s running a firewall in a home network. Therefore, he has a high level of trust and can access.”

A short-lived credential is issued granting access to all authentic users and devices.

CSE also prevents trusted users from overreaching by keeping a record of all services and applications a user has permission to access, and revoking accesses when permissions are violated.

CSE puts a tool at every front, scanning and examining the traffic and permitting or blocking as required. Application-level connectivity is guarded with zero-trust network access or privilege access. All accesses to SaaS applications are mediated by a cloud access security broker (CASB) that enforces policies between the user and the cloud service provider. And for traffic going to websites on the Internet, a secure web gateway (SWG) scans all movements and enforces corporate policies.

All these products are packed into the single solution that is the Cloud Secure Edge to ensure that tool fragmentation is entirely sidestepped.

SonicWall also integrates with a variety of identity managers, device managers and security providers for better discovery and determination.

For more, check out SonicWall’s demo from the Security Field Day event at TechFieldDay.com.