What Is Secure Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation efforts can pose significant security risks to an organization. Adopting cloud computing, AI, and other modern technologies expands attack surfaces and can introduce new vulnerabilities and configuration issues. As a result, companies can suffer from security incidents, operational downtime, and compliance failures.

Secure digital transformation integrates security into every phase of the digital transformation process, reducing the risk to the business. This includes replacing legacy security technologies, such as MPLS, traditional firewalls, and siloed security products, with more modern alternatives, such as a converged Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform offering zero trust, optimized cloud access, and continuous threat prevention. This change enhances adaptability and scalability while reducing threat exposure.

Understanding Secure Digital Transformation

Secure digital transformation combines IT modernization efforts with adaptive security controls. As companies transition to cloud deployments, hybrid work, and modern applications, they need security solutions that can deal with the dissolution of the traditional network perimeter.

By integrating security from the start rather than “bolting it on” afterward, an organization reduces the risk of misconfigurations and control gaps that leave it vulnerable to attack. Additionally, converged security offers greater efficiency by removing potential redundancies and eliminating the need for context switching between various standalone dashboards.

Why Security Is Critical to Digital Transformation

Digital transformation can introduce various security risks. For example, migration to the cloud creates the potential for data leakage if cloud storage is misconfigured to be publicly accessible. As a result, companies can suffer data loss, compliance penalties, and reputational damage.

The transition from old to new infrastructure is also a prime target for cyberattackers, who take advantage of the fact that transitioning systems may not have comprehensive security in place. Security should be a board-level priority during modernization projects to ensure that old, new, and temporary infrastructure is secure throughout the entire process.

Challenges with Legacy Infrastructure

Often, organizations struggle with security during modernization projects due to the limitations of legacy security solutions. For example, virtual private networks (VPNs) assume and rely upon a secure perimeter, and depending on various standalone solutions can introduce integration challenges and visibility gaps that slow incident response times.

Maintaining legacy security architectures can also introduce significant costs to the business. Often, these are less efficient than modern solutions and lack the scalability required to scale globally and support remote work. As a result, companies need more tools to achieve the same level of security, increasing costs and security overhead.

The Role of Zero Trust in Secure Digital Transformation

The zero trust model operates under the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Instead of implicitly trusting insiders, it mandates verifying all requests, regardless of source. This protects against insider threats and lateral movement by attackers inside the network, who may otherwise have remained undetected.

Implementing zero trust principles during digital transformation reduces an organization’s digital attack surface by reducing the set of systems accessible to an attacker. As a result, organizations are less vulnerable to cyberattacks and can more easily comply with regulatory requirements, especially in strict industries such as finance and healthcare.

How SASE Enables Secure Digital Transformation

SASE is a modern security solution that converges various networking and security functions into a single, cloud-native platform. Adopting SASE addresses the complexity of fragmented, siloed security architectures. Its cloud-native design also enhances the scalability and agility of security architectures and supports global workforces and consistent, location-agnostic policy enforcement.

Networking and Security Convergence

SASE is defined by integrating networking and security capabilities within a single solution. This includes software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), and advanced threat prevention.

 This security convergence offers numerous potential benefits, including:

• Decreased complexity via security integration
• Enhanced security visibility across the entire IT ecosystem
• Cost efficiencies due to a unified service model
• Reduced downtime through simplified troubleshooting

Cloud Optimization and Performance

SASE’s integration of network and cloud optimization capabilities is essential to maximize the performance of SaaS and IaaS traffic routed over the corporate network. By intelligently routing traffic to its destination, SASE can reduce latency and packet loss.

 This optimization is critical as corporate environments become more distributed, hosting various cloud-based tools and supporting remote and hybrid workforces. Reduced latency enhances employee efficiency and the user experience. 

Real-Time Threat Prevention

Modern cyberattacks are sophisticated and fast-paced, leaving little time for threat detection and response. Real-time threat prevention identifies and blocks cyberattacks before they can reach their intended destination.

 SASE accomplishes this via a multi-layered defense, incorporating intrusion prevention systems (IPS), anti-malware, and DNS security capabilities, and leveraging machine learning to identify trends and detect emerging threats. This approach reduces attacker dwell time by decreasing the risk of a successful attack and providing security teams with the tools needed to efficiently detect and remediate active incidents.

Secure Digital Transformation with Cato Networks

The Cato SASE Cloud Platform is a single-vendor SASE platform that converges key networking and security capabilities into a single-pass engine. This design makes it ideally suited to support secure digital transformation and simplifies deployment and centralized management.

How Cato Is Different from Traditional Solutions

Cato’s converged, global, and cloud-native security model differs from traditional solutions in several ways, including:

• Security Convergence: Key security capabilities are implemented in a single, integrated solution rather than multiple, siloed tools.
• Cloud-Native Design: SASE is implemented as a cloud-native solution rather than relying on physical appliances.
• Minimal Configuration: Cato SASE Cloud Platform is agentless and requires minimal configuration, allowing rapid deployment.
• Global Network: Cato operates a global private backbone to support high network and application performance at scale.

 Integration with Zero Trust, SASE, and SSE

The Cato SASE Cloud Platform includes the security capabilities of Security Service Edge (SSE). This includes key security features, such as native support for ZTNA, which enforces zero trust principles for all network access.

By integrating zero trust with other security functions, SASE reduces security complexity, improves efficiency, and simplifies regulatory compliance. Security policies are applied consistently across all locations and users, and centralized visibility aids incident response and regulatory reporting.

FAQs about Secure Digital Transformation

What does secure digital transformation mean?

Secure digital transformation builds security into the digital modernization process, embracing the philosophy of security by design. This reduces the risks associated with traditional digital transformation, which often bolts security on at the end.

Why is security so important in digital transformation?

Digital transformation can introduce various security and compliance risks as new solutions expand the organization’s digital attack surface and threaten customer trust and brand reputation. Implementing security by design rather than bolting it on afterward reduces cyber risk exposure and the potential for compliance violations.

How does Cato Networks help with secure digital transformation?

The Cato SASE Cloud Platform converges various security and networking capabilities into a cloud-native solution backed by a dedicated private backbone. Eliminating security silos streamlines the deployment process, and global reach supports cloud adoption, hybrid work, and other digital transformation efforts.

Can secure digital transformation improve performance?

A converged SASE platform integrates security capabilities into a scalable, cloud-native platform. By doing so, it can reduce latency and downtime by decreasing cyber risk exposure and intelligently routing traffic through a network of global PoPs.

Advancing Secure Digital Transformation with Cato Networks

Secure digital transformation is essential to managing the security risks of modernization efforts. Otherwise, new solutions and technologies can introduce security gaps and compliance risks.

The Cato SASE Cloud Platform addresses these risks via security consolidation and a cloud-native architecture. As a result, it offers the agility and scalability needed to implement secure digital transformation at enterprise scale.
Learn how Cato Networks delivers secure, high-performance digital transformation. Request a demo.