Palo Alto Networks™, the leader in next-generation firewalls, today announced that results of an industry study reveal that legacy security products are not controlling users’ applications of choice within the enterprise, despite more than $6B spent annually on these products.
These are results of the company’s third Application Usage and Risk Report, a semi-annual analysis of application usage on enterprise networks. Unlike other industry reports that are based on behavioral surveys, Palo Alto Networks’ usage report looks at which applications are in use, identifies emerging trends, and discusses the associated business risks or benefits. Made available today, this edition of the report summarizes traffic assessments of nearly 900,000 users across more than 60 large organizations that span markets including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government, retail and education.
Despite the fact that every organization in the study was equipped with a legacy firewall and 87 percent had one or more additional controls such as a proxy, an IPS or URL filtering, the sample was unable to have visibility into, nor control of, application traffic. Examples from the report include:
- An average of six peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing applications were found in 92 percent of the sample networks – with some organizations having as many as 17 variants. Common examples included Xunlei, BitTorrent and GnuNet.
- Browser-based file sharing was found in 76 percent of the organizations, with an average of five variants. The most common examples were YouSendIt!, MegaUpload and MediaSpace.
- In nearly every organization, applications that enable users to bypass security controls (public proxies, encrypted tunnels, remote desktop control) were found.
Today’s applications are built for accessibility using standard features that enable them to automatically slip through security controls. The analysis shows that more than half of the nearly 500 unique applications found enable accessibility by hopping ports or using port 80 or 443 (typically open to enable web browsing or SSL traffic).
In addition to the business and security risks that the lack of visibility over these applications poses, applications also consume an organization’s bandwidth at a significant rate. From the report, more than half of the bandwidth was being consumed by 28 percent of the applications, most of which were consumer oriented.
"The findings in this report are significant, especially when you consider these tough economic times and the money organizations are spending on security products which are not working," said Lane Bess, President and CEO of Palo Alto Networks. "It’s clear that applications and threats have evolved and legacy firewall technology has not kept up. Administrators need a security infrastructure that does more than look at ports and protocols to provide the visibility and control necessary to fully protect their networks."
The Application Usage and Risk Report is available for download from Palo Alto Networks at http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/aur. Additional information on more than 800 applications that are identified by Palo Alto Networks can be found in the company’s Application Research Center (ARC), an online resource that contains up-to-date information on the rapidly evolving application landscape – including the latest news, alerts and analysis. Included in the ARC is the ability to search the Applipedia™ for important characteristics of each application that must be considered when developing policies to enable safe and productive application usage within the enterprise.
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks™ is the leader in next-generation firewalls, enabling unprecedented visibility and granular policy control of applications and content – by user, not just IP address – at up to 10Gbps with no performance degradation. Based on patent-pending App-ID™ technology, Palo Alto Networks firewalls accurately identify and control applications – regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or SSL encryption – and scan content to stop threats and prevent data leakage. Enterprises can for the first time embrace Web 2.0 and maintain complete visibility and control, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership through device consolidation. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.
