CDM-CYBER-DEFENSE-eMAGAZINE-March-2019

SaaS DNS Security: Are you Protected?
By Kanaiya Vasani, Executive Vice President, Products and Corporate Development at Infoblox
Are Software as a Service (SaaS) security solutions truly the panacea they are publicized to be?
The answer is, it depends on how the SaaS solution is architected. A majority of SaaS-only security
solutions are “overlay” solutions that simply provide an additional layer of security on top of an enterprise’s
existing network and security infrastructure. These overlay solutions are easy for the vendor to develop,
but difficult for the customer to combine with other existing security solutions and derive value from. In
contrast, a hybrid approach to security is one that tightly integrates SaaS solutions with an enterprise’s
existing IT infrastructure and leverages SaaS capabilities to seamlessly extend and scale on-premise
solution performance. With a hybrid solution, the vendor does the heavy lifting of seamless integration
with existing infrastructure, thus providing a unified solution, which unlocks valuable context available
from the on-premises infrastructure. Such context allows the hybrid solution to prioritize threats better. In
addition, the unified solution enables sharing of data with broader security ecosystem for an efficient and
optimized incident response.
DNS as a Security Tool
As enterprises gear up to handle the barrage of increasingly targeted and sophisticated cyber-attacks,
security architects must take advantage of the visibility that each IT asset can provide. DNS is an
excellent example of a scalable and pervasive network infrastructure protocol that offers unmatched
visibility into network traffic patterns, malicious and otherwise. If used optimally, DNS can provide an
affordable and scalable first line of defense for detection and mitigation of the vast majority of known
threats. Behavioral analysis of DNS traffic can also serve as an “early warning system,” flagging potential
zero-day threats in the network.
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