PwC and Palo Alto Networks Launch Security Framework for Business Leaders

Recently, we have noticed a common observation shared by many of the senior executives at our customers. With the increased awareness of cybersecurity as a business challenge, there is a commensurate need to discuss cybersecurity in business terms, specifically around how security can enable organizational agility, not slow it down. At Palo Alto Networks, we have focused on meeting this need with a variety of efforts, and recently took another important step in this regard.

Last week, with our new partner PwC, we released a jointly developed framework to help board members, senior executives, and technical executives (e.g., Chief Information Officers and Chief Information Security Officers) organize their corporate cybersecurity strategies around breach prevention. To position companies to prevent successful cyberattacks and enable organizational agility, we believe organizations must:

• Identify organization-specific critical assets, priorities and related governance structures.
• Monitor and analyze all traffic to establish visibility of all users, applications and content traversing corporate networks, clouds and endpoints, in order to define and refine organizational information security policies.
• Protect from attack by enforcing policy to reduce the organizational attack surface and prevent known and unknown threats.
• Detect and respond to the inevitable, successful attack in a manner that incorporates mitigations and protection mechanisms to prevent similar attacks in the future.

Chad Kinzelberg, Palo Alto Networks SVP for Corporate and Business Development, and David Burg, the Global Leader of the Cybersecurity Consulting practice at PwC, recently hosted a webinar on this framework. It includes practical applications of how the framework can help meet two increasingly crucial business needs: securely enabling adoption of cloud technologies and preventing advanced persistent threats. You can view this webinar on demand in ourBrightTalk portal.

We invite you to check out the framework and read the white paper, which discusses the framework in greater detail, and we welcome your feedback. How can this approach help your business prevent successful attacks to securely enable agility and productivity?

Will Howerton

[Palo Alto Networks Research Center]