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Introducing Noetic Outpost

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A common challenge for security teams today is getting the right level of visibility and insight into their cybersecurity posture across their entire estate. We see many discussions about the current digital transformation, and the shift to the cloud, and Gartner estimates that by 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed on cloud infrastructure and services, an increase from 20% in 2020. Very few companies today, however, have a homogenous IT environment. For most security teams, it is a case of trying to harmonize different perspectives from traditional on-premises applications and services, SaaS applications and multiple public and private cloud providers. This can often lead to different tools, processes, and approaches to deal with the multiple environments –  creating more business and technical complexity.
 
As a cybersecurity asset attack surface management (CAASM) vendor, we are very aware of this challenge, and providing that ‘full-stack’ visibility of all assets and entities across cloud and on-premises is a key value which we provide to our customers. The visualization we provide of assets and their cyber relationships drives better insights into cyber risk and identify security coverage gaps, and it is dependent on our ability to connect and ingest data from different sources across traditional on-premises software, as well as modern cloud environments.

Extending API support to On-Premises and Private Cloud Networks

The Noetic platform is based on an API aggregation model, where we use prebuilt connectors for common security and IT management tools to ingest data, using the OpenAPI specification.  Today, we are announcing Noetic Outpost as a new component for the Noetic platform, it allows us to scale support for connectors within a customer’s own environment, ensuring the secure flow of data between those systems and Noetic’s hosted SaaS environment.
 
We have identified 2 common scenarios where we believe Noetic Outpost will be valuable for our customers:

  • Accessing data on a tool that is deployed behind a firewall on a corporate network.
  • Integrating with a tool where the APIs reside on a private cloud network, not easily accessible from the Noetic SaaS cloud.

The Noetic Outpost will run inside a Kubernetes cluster or dedicated virtual machine on the customer’s location. It will then ‘pair’ with the SaaS instance on the Noetic platform at which point connectors can be deployed on it. As with the core Noetic platform, these connectors can be scheduled to run on a regular basis and will share relevant asset information back to the Noetic platform for aggregation and correlation with other data sources to build out the Noetic graph. 

screenshot of Noetic Outpost

The benefit of this approach is that it allows customers to provide Noetic with controlled, secure access to relevant data sources on corporate networks or private clouds, without relying on VPNs or tunnels to provide access. Noetic Outpost is designed to connect outbound to SaaS, as opposed to connecting SaaS down “into” the corporate network which is a significant risk to both customers and the SaaS vendor themselves. These 3rd party supplier VPN compromises have been subject to significant security attacks in recent times.

Connectors for on-premises solutions are numerous but could include VMWare vCenter systems of “farms” of virtual machines, along with software configuration tools like Microsoft’s Endpoint Configuration Manager (formerly SCCM). There are also many popular enterprise security tools with on-premises deployment models, including Tenable SC or Rapid7 InsightVM.

Popular compliance and cybersecurity frameworks like NIST, CSF or NIST SP800-53 do not delineate between security controls on Cloud vs On-Premises machines. Noetic Outpost provides a unique capability to unify these datasets.

Noetic Outpost allows customers to scale their use of the Noetic platform across public and private cloud networks, and beyond the corporate firewall, to ensure that the security teams is working on the full picture of their asset landscape and their cyber relationships. To find out more about how Outpost can help in your environment, you can register for a personalized demo of the Noetic platform.