ForeScout has announced updates to its ForeScout CounterACT 8 solution, adding enhanced device visibility and control capabilities to mitigate risk, reduce the attack surface and automate incident response across the extended enterprise network – from the campus to data centre, cloud and critical infrastructure.
The IoT security company says the enhanced device visibility platform increases scalability, cloud-based device intelligence, IoT device assessment, and flexible centralised licensing to help enterprises see and control more than 5 billion IP-connected devices, including traditional, mobile, virtual, IoT and operational technology (OT).
“The industry has a massive visibility problem that is only growing as the number of corporate unmanaged IP-connected devices continues to explode. Enterprises can’t protect their networks if they don’t know what’s on their networks,” said Michael DeCesare, CEO and president, ForeScout Technologies. “The result of two years of engineering innovation, our enhanced device visibility platform represents a step forward and sets a foundation for the deep, scalable device visibility and control required to secure the new generation of enterprise networks.”
In the last year, organisations have had to keep pace with the rapid growth of devices while managing security hygiene and compliance. Companies are discovering up to 60% more devices on their network than previously known with an increasing majority that cannot support management and security agents. Threat actors have also begun to exploit the expanded attack surface represented by non-traditional IoT and OT devices as entry points into the enterprise.
To solve these challenges, ForeScout has expanded its device visibility platform to deliver the new features and benefits including better insight into some of the fastest growing enterprise devices, including industrial and critical infrastructure systems, IPv6 addressable devices and devices managed by cloud controllers such as Cisco Meraki.
Additionally, the ForeScout Device Cloud, launched in July 2017, has grown to be one of the largest crowd-sourced device repositories in the world, now housing more than three million enterprise devices from more than 500 customers that share anonymized device insight. ForeScout’s platform uses the data to analyse device types and publish new and improved device profiles for better auto-classification. Additionally, ForeScout’s platform now includes a new IoT risk assessment capability that allows organizations to identify devices with default or weak credentials and automate policy actions to ensure compliance and mitigate risks. Lastly, the device visibility platform adds new passive-only discovery and profiling to provide organizations with real-time OT and industrial device inventory without introducing operational risk or impacting reliability.
Third is an improved management scale from one million to two million devices per single deployment allows enterprises to keep pace with device growth. Network managers can also optimise rack space and data centre utilisation by managing up to 20,000 devices on a single 1U appliance with full 10Gbps traffic monitoring. A new virtual deployment option includes KVM support, in addition to VMware and Hyper-V. The new auto IP-allocation feature allows customers to automate IP distribution and management across a multi-appliance cluster and reduce manual administrative tasks.
Finally, the new ForeScout Flexx licensing provides customers choice and simplifies portability and entitlement management by enabling them to purchase ForeScout’s CounterACT and Enterprise Manager platform as a centralised software license.
