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Pulse Secure, a provider of Secure Access solutions to both enterprises and service providers, announced the release of Pulse Policy Secure (PPS) 9.0R3 to extend its Zero Trust Security model to IIoT devices and smart factories. Below is our recent interview with Prakash Mana, Pulse Secure’s vice president of product management.
Q: What is being announced?
A: The release of Pulse Secure’s Pulse Policy Secure (PPS) 9.0R3. The new version extends Pulse Secure’s Zero Trust Security model to IoT devices and smart factories. The new version enables factories to streamline machinery repairs and diminish potentially economically-devasting downtime through IT-managed secure access. It also secures factory networks by expanding its behavioral analytics to IoT devices, detecting anomalies and preventing their compromise.
Q: What is Pulse Secure’s strategy behind the launch?
A: Cybersecurity is critical to the digital economy where IT security teams face off daily with hackers. With the rise of Industry 4.0, which uses IIoT and cloud to boost manufacturing output, cybersecurity concerns are now bleeding over into the operational domain where data breaches and cybercrime are on the rise. IDC expects that the proliferation of connected information, instrumentations, and cloud networks will drive manufacturers in 2018 to redesign their security architectures and rethink how they can integrate IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology). Both are essential to Industry 4.0 initiatives.
Pulse Secure Release 9.0 is a simple and comprehensive step forward in this strategy. It gives OT teams a tool to discover, profile and secure the smart devices operating within their environment. It provides a way to automate the infrastructure demarcation between IT and OT to expand the use of zero trust policies in both domains for maximum security while also providing added value to address practical issues such as rapid factory floor repair for maximum factory floor uptime.
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Q: What markets are they primarily focused on?
A: Manufacturers are redesigning their security architectures to protect their IT and OT infrastructure under a united zero trust security umbrella. Pulse Secure Release 9.0 is a simple and comprehensive step forward in this strategy. It gives OT teams a tool to discover, profile and secure the smart devices operating within their environment. It provides a way to automate the infrastructure demarcation between IT and OT to expand the use of zero trust policies in both domains for maximum security while also providing added value to address practical issues such as rapid factory floor repair for maximum factory floor uptime.
Q: While zero trust isn’t a new concept, how is Pulse Secure applying the standard in an innovative way?
A: Pulse Secure provides enterprises with a zero trust framework that assumes that nothing inside or outside of the enterprise perimeters is trusted and the network must verify anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access. Pulse Secure’s latest release extends this concept to the factory floor or smart buildings where IoT systems now manage legacy devices such as factory floor PLCs or office building HVAC systems. The Pulse solution is able to discover and profile IoT devices operating within a factory or building and secure them with policies for local and remote access are based on user role, device used, type of access needed and targeted IoT resource.
Q:What features comprises PPS 9.0R3?
A: PPS 9.0R3 extends the Zero Trust Security model to IIoT devices used in smart factories and buildings, with blended IT and OT environments. It automatically discovers and profiles all IIoT systems, such as factory floor SCADAs, PLCs and HMIs, or office building HVAC systems, providing complete visibility and securing them by enforcing policies for local and remote access. PPS 9.0 also automatically provisions IIoT devices to next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), such as Palo Alto, Checkpoint and Juniper. The latest release of PPS also provides sophisticated behavioral analytics that alert security teams of anomalous IoT device behavior.
Q:What makes PPS 9.0R3 stand out from its competition?
A: Pulse Secure Release 9.0 combines VPN and NAC technologies to provide a single zero trust security umbrella for blended IT and OT environments while also delivering greater efficiencies for manufacturing. Pulse Secure is the only NAC vendor that features auto-provisioning of secure access policies on NGFWs to speed factory floor service repair and boost manufacturing uptime. When combined with our newly released behavior analytics, manufacturing customers have the means to find, secure and fix IoT devices quickly.
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Q:What are the target audiences for this release?
A: CISO-CISOs need to know their security posture, have full user and device visibility, and mitigate endpoint, IoT and compliance risks. With Pulse, CISOs can gain this operational intelligence, implement a “comply to connect” strategy, and be able to cost-effectively deploy NAC as part of a layered defense.
IT Security-IT wants to protect and remediate IoT devices quickly to maximize uptime. With auto-provisioning of secure access policies and behavior analytics, IT can grant support contractors secure access to troubled IoT devices in an automated fashion. Auto provisioning of secure access policies reduces IT overhead while improving time to remediate troubled IoT devices.
Network Architec-As a key stakeholder of the company’s next-generation firewalls, the network architect will find PPS 9.0 auto-provisioning will help scale their IoT device architecture. Large deployments with possibly thousands of IoT devices involves man hours of IT work to push access policies to the firewall. Auto-provisioning will significantly reduce this time and help with scalability requirements.
Channel Partner-Resellers can engage with existing and new customers to convey the benefits of PPS 9.0 as part and IoT secure access and security strategy. Furthermore, our partners can explain the ease of deployment with means to start with visibility, and the value of maintaining the security and uptime of customer IoT implementations. PPS behavior analytics is a further IoT security feature, while it also provides cross-sell opportunities by integrating with NGFW firewall vendors.
Q:What is the cost?
A: The latest features of Pulse Policy Secure 9.0 are available for immediate delivery on physical or virtual Pulse Secure Appliances (PSA). Existing customers with PSA appliances under PPS subscription or software maintenance can readily upgrade at no charge. PPS with a virtual appliance, three-year subscription starts at $31,000 MSRP for 500 concurrent connections. Pulse Connect Secure customers can cost-effectively extend their VPN investment to include network visibility, access control and mobile security with the Pulse Access Suite.
