Providing Greater Network Accessibility While Enforcing Security Policies: ForeScout, an IT Security Innovator

“Our growth is driven by three important trends: the increasing prevalence of personally owned computing devices in the workplace, the ‘Internet of Things’ phenomenon and the nearly continuous string of high-profile data breaches that are occurring around the world.”  – Michael DeCesare, CEO, ForeScout Technologies

Contrary to popular belief, you can protect your organization from cyberattacks. ForeScout, one of the world’s fastest-growing private security companies, offers the technologies that cancontinuously find and fix security exposures, defend against cyberattacks, and orchestrate information sharing with third-party security tools.

Based in Campbell, California, ForeScout provides products that protect more than 1,800 enterprises worldwide, including major financial institutions, federal government agencies, and software firms. Many are Global 2000 companies. The company is also targeting state and local government, education and healthcare customers.

ForeScout’smain focus since its founding in 2000 has been to offer the most easy-to-deploy, unobtrusive, extensible, and scalable network access control solutions to the IT world. The CEO of ForeScout is Michael DeCesare who, before joining ForeScout, served as president of Intel Security from 2011 to 2014 and as the executive vice-president of worldwide sales at McAfee from 2007 to 2011 – prior to that company’s acquisition by Intel.

ForeScout has enjoyed a steady stream of industry accolades from analysts, industry publications, and customers. In 2011, Gartner named ForeScout a market leader for network access control, and the company continues to maintain its position in the leader quadrant. Gartner also named ForeScout a “visionary” company. With the widespread adoption of BYOD and the Internet of Things (IoT), the company is experiencing massive growth.

Getting into the Products and Solutions
ForeScout’s flagship CounterACT™ appliance provides IT security managers with the ability to see and control every device on the network. For example, if a device is found to be a security risk, ForeScout’s product can automatically remove the device from the network, or it can update the device so that it no longer poses a risk. As a result,ForeScout’s customers’ networks are far more immune to cyberattack.

ForeScoutCounterACT

The ForeScoutCounterACT platform provides continuous security monitoring and mitigation. It allows IT organizations to efficiently address numerous access, endpoint compliance, and threat management challenges—even in the most complex enterprise networks. CounterACT is available as a physical or virtual appliance to meet the needs of businesses of any size.

ControlFabric Architecture
ForeScout’sControlFabric™ Architecture is a set of network, security and management interoperability technologies that are built into ForeScoutCounterACT. It enables ForeScoutCounterACT and other IT solutions to exchange information, so customers gain continuous monitoring and attack-mitigation capabilities across the enterprise.

Integration Modules
ForeScoutCounterACT™ extended integrationsare available as separately licensed modules that can be added to the CounterACT appliance. Powered by ForeScoutControlFabric™technology, these integrations enable CounterACT and other IT solutions to exchange information and more efficiently mitigate a wide variety of network, security and operational issues. In addition, an Open Integration Module allows customers, systems integrators, and technology vendors to integrate third-party security and management systems with ForeScoutCounterACT.

Being Different in the Domain
ForeScout products fill a critical niche at the intersection of the network and the endpoint device. As a result, the company is able to provide network access control of each computing device, and can automatically fix common security problems on each device. ForeScout’s approach is unique in the following ways:

– The CounterACT platform’s agentless technology finds managed endpoints and detects endpoints that traditional endpoint management and security systems can’t see. It also uncovers anomalies on managed systems that need to be addressed. Today more than ever, this visibility is important because, with BYOD and IoT, devices of all types are constantly showing up on networks. And every device on the network is a potential launching point for a cyberattack. ForeScoutprovides context on these devices and enables customers to enforce a variety of actions, based on their security policies.

– ForeScout products install and scale rapidly, and they work with the network infrastructure and third-party tools customers already own. This has allowed one ForeScout customer to deploy and support one million endpoints within one year. According to Ken Phiel, CEO, Pioneer Investments, “We were up and running with ForeScout very quickly and received fantastic intelligence [about the devices on our network] almost immediately. That alone was worth the cost of the solution, as our team was much better informed and ultimately able to make more effective decisions.”

– ForeScout technology is vendor- and infrastructure-agnostic, so it works well with others. ForeScout’s willingness to share the contextual data it discovers about endpoints with other security vendors through its ControlFabricArchitecture makes customers’ existing security, management, and compliance tools smarter and minimizes vulnerability windows. This ability to orchestrate common workflows between disparate security products enables customers to tear down security management silos, obtain significant operational efficiencies and, best of all, gain far better security.

“Today, there’s a technology chasm that divides enterprise security products, resulting in disjointed security management silos. At ForeScout, our ControlFabric Architecture bridges those gaps, providing significant orchestration value to the entire security ecosystem.”
– Michael DeCesare, CEO, ForeScout Technologies

Staying Ahead of the Game
Today, the biggest challenge facing ForeScout is hiring enough talented people to sustain its rapid growth and product demand. In the near term, ForeScout will focus its sights on the areas of IT security that it knows best, such as network access control, endpoint compliance management, and IT security orchestration among third-party products. It’s a strategy that should keep ForeScout at the forefront of IT security innovation for many years to come.