Gartner Details Real-Time 'Adaptive' Security Infrastructure

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Gartner Security Summit 2008 -- What if your network could proactively adapt to threats and the needs of the business? That’s the vision of the adaptive security infrastructure unveiled by Gartner here today.

Neil MacDonald, vice president and fellow at Gartner, says this is the security model necessary to accommodate the emergence of multiple perimeters and moving parts on the network, and increasingly advanced threats targeting enterprises. “We can’t control everything [in the network] anymore,” MacDonald says. That’s why a policy-based security model that is contextual makes sense, he says.

“The next generation data center is adaptive – it will do workloads on the fly,” he says. “It will be service-oriented, virtualized, model-driven and contextual. So security has to be, too.”

Among the key features of an adaptive security infrastructure are security platforms that share and correlate information rather than point solutions, so the heuristics system could communicate its suspicions to the firewall, for example. “Then the firewall could block the IP address” while the signature-based scanner could create a new signature for the threat, MacDonald says.

“Why doesn’t the heuristic system talk to the firewall?” he says. If security modules such as AV and firewalls communicated, they could correlate data on threats. “Then there would be fewer false positives."

Other features would be finer-grained controls, automation (in addition to human intervention), on-demand security services, security as a service, and integration of security and management data. And, rather than adding security to custom applications after they go operational, security models would be created at the design phase of an app, MacDonald says. “Security and operations would have better synergy."

A major change with this model of real-time, adaptive security is shifting authorization management and policy to an on-demand service that contains details and policy enforcement that matches compliance and can adapt to the user’s situation when he or she is trying to access an application, for instance.

MacDonald admits that the reality of an adaptive security infrastructure seems futuristic and faces plenty of challenges in adoption, but there are some of the building blocks available today, such as virtualization, authorization management, and deep packet inspection, for example.

Among the trends driving this vision is the increase in targeted attacks, as well as what Gartner sees as an explosion in the number of perimeters given mobile users, network guests, and business partners, for instance. “Everything has a perimeter,” and all elements in the network today are potentially hostile, he notes.

And it goes both ways, he says. “Expect our stuff to be plugged into some unknown infrastructure” by mobile users, he says. “Does that environment conform to my policies?”

Ted Julian, vice president of marketing for Application Security Inc., says he was intrigued by MacDonald’s adaptive security model and is surprised that no major security vendors are talking about this type of model today. He says scanning tools could possibly play a major role in this type of security infrastructure, and the key would be sharing information among various types of scanners.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Dark Reading's editors directly, send us a message.