How Palo Alto Networks IoT Security Achieves 70x Time Savings Protecting IoT Devices in the Enterprise

The mission of Palo Alto Networks is to ensure that each day is more secure than the last. As part of that mission, Palo Alto Networks has delivered a steady stream of innovations to help organizations secure their digital transformation technologies.

One prime example of digital transformation is the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), and Operational Technology (OT) devices, including surveillance cameras, temperature monitoring sensors, public retail kiosks, and healthcare as well as manufacturing equipment that streamline business processes and transmit data to applications for monitoring business functions. IoT devices have seen exponential growth in the enterprise in the past five years. According to a 2020 Gartner study, more than 80% of organizations currently use IoT technology to solve their business challenges. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 IoT Threat Report found that, on average, 30% of the devices found on a typical enterprise network can be defined as IoT devices.2

Unfortunately, securing all these devices, with their different embedded systems, diverse features, and mostly unencrypted traffic is often an afterthought, which is probably why almost 20% of organizations have reported IoT-based attacks in the past three years, according to Gartner.

IoT devices represent a serious enterprise security challenge because they are based on no-longer-supported operating systems and lack built-in security controls. This increases the attack surface and exposes you to a huge number of potential vulnerabilities and attack targets—an urgent issue that needs a viable resolution. 57% of these devices are susceptible to medium- or high-severity attacks, according to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 IoT Threat Report, and 98% of IoT traffic is unencrypted. Traditional security tools such as Network Access Control (NAC) and endpoint protection solutions struggle to accurately discover, classify, group, and understand IoT devices.

There are solutions available for securing IoT devices, but most require a lot of IT time and resources to install, configure, and maintain. IT has to provision servers, install software and IoT sensors for hundreds of IoT devices, as well as create policies—including access control lists (ACLs)—for each. All of this can take days or weeks, after which there are continual security updates and changes to keep up with as new devices or new types of attacks arrive.

Many of these solutions can only discover and manage a fraction of the total number of IoT devices on an enterprise network, as they use a static, signature-based approach to identification that struggles to keep up with the constant onslaught of new devices and device variants.

The Palo Alto Networks Solution

There is an alternative, however. Palo Alto Networks IoT Security is the industry’s most advanced, comprehensive IoT security solution, harnessing a patented and behavior-based three-tier machine-learning model, crowdsourced IoT data, patented App-ID™ technology, and a cloud SaaS architecture to:

• Discover and identify all unmanaged devices, including type, vendor, model, OS, and rich device context encompassing 50+ attributes for each.
• Provide deep insights into device security posture, user and network information.
• Assess risk and an associated risk score for every IoT device, taking into account device compliance, vulnerabilities, threats, anomalies, and exploits.
• Establish normal device baseline behaviors in comparison to crowdsourced behavioral data for similar devices.
• Detect any behavioral anomalies that might indicate an attack.
• Provide actionable policy recommendations for native enforcement.

This is all without the need for current Palo Alto Networks NGFW customers to install any agents, additional sensors, or forklift upgrades.

Unlike other IoT security solutions, which often only alert you to security issues and then leave it to you to address them, Palo Alto Networks IoT Security applies its own best-in-class prevention capabilities to secure IoT devices, integrating natively with the Palo Alto Networks NGFW and ITAM/ITSM, NAC, SIEM and CMMS workflows.

Zero Trust Architecture

The Palo Alto Networks solution is architected using a Zero Trust methodology that makes no assumptions about the credibility of users, IoT devices, applications, or data accessing or being accessed on an organization’s network. Everything is verified every time all the time using a variety of powerful technologies and implementation strategies such as microsegmentation and least-privileged access. The Zero Trust Model doesn’t stop at the point of policy creation but continues monitoring IoT devices and adjusts its actions