One Vendor or Many Vendors to Secure Your Hybrid Workforce?

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Companies need to rethink their security approach in today’s world of hybrid networks and workforces. It’s a time of cybersecurity transformation where companies support employees who work from everywhere and corporate assets and data are stored anywhere—in public clouds, in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, on-prem data centers, and more.

This transformation has companies at a crossroads: should they keep building out their security portfolio with best-of-breed point products from multiple vendors? Or can they find a security vendor that can solve myriad security challenges within a single platform?

I recently hosted a LinkedIn Live where this question came up with Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, and Rusty Williams, principal architect for Zero Trust here at Palo Alto Networks. We talked about how businesses are reevaluating their security approach and want to move to a modern security strategy that protects and improves hybrid workforce efficiency and user experience.

Multi-vendor, point-product security solutions repeatedly came up as a roadblock for organizations trying to make this move. For many organizations, a multi-vendor and complex setup often requires trade-offs among security, performance, and user experience.

We agreed a single-vendor platform approach is a viable solution to modernize an organization's security strategy, and it is the first area of inquiry organizations should explore when evaluating vendors to help enable their cybersecurity transformation.

Single-vendor vs. multi-vendor security

A single-vendor approach to security offers several benefits over a traditional multi-vendor security approach, especially in the context of zero trust network access (ZTNA).

A single-vendor platform approach provides a holistic solution to address the entire attack surface, ensuring a more consistent policy while providing a clear understanding of what's happening in the network. Best-of-breed point solutions built into a multi-vendor approach only provide fragmented results, leading to partial insights and unacceptable trade-offs between security and usability.

The good news is there are now powerful single-vendor security platforms available for organizations today that eliminate traditional trade-offs while enabling businesses to truly transform and better align security outcomes to business needs.

For example, the security capabilities within Prisma SASE secure traffic and access everywhere, irrespective of whether a user accesses data from an internet location, public cloud, hybrid cloud, or on-premises data center.

In addition to complete traffic and network access protection, a single-vendor platform offers a comprehensive and well-integrated zero trust architecture that combines the benefits of best-of-breed point solutions without sacrificing consistency or visibility.

Prisma Access, the cloud-delivered security solution within Prisma SASE, is itself a best-of-breed solution that protects the hybrid workforce with superior security and an exceptional user experience from a simple, unified security product.

The single-vendor platform approach helps turn security into a business enabler

For many organizations, security has historically been an afterthought or a response to a mandate rather than a strategic initiative. As such, it is often seen as something that is a hindrance to business growth and agility.

However, technological advances and the need to tame our vastly expanded threat landscape have afforded the opportunity to finally start turning security into a business enabler and a positive contributor to any organization’s bottom line.

With the right infrastructure and technology in place, security can help businesses be more agile, respond quickly to changing environments, and align with business outcomes.

ZTNA 2.0, available through the Prisma SASE platform, provides consistent, secure access for your hybrid workforce to the data, applications, and resources they need to do their work anywhere. With ZTNA 2.0, businesses can stay productive, connected, and secure, keeping their data protected at all times.

Security has never been more important, and with a single-vendor approach, it can be a true business enabler.

Check out the LinkedIn Live conversation Zeus, Rusty, and I had about this topic in the clip above. If you are curious about what else we discussed during our hour together, watch the full conversation on-demand to hear more about zero trust architecture and how ZTNA 2.0 can help minimize your attack surface.