Your clients may have deployed hybrid architectures as part of their work from anywhere (WFA) initiatives. However, these hybrid networks can expand the attack surface, reducing visibility and increasing risks. It takes an average of 197 days to identify a security threat. That is almost two weeks longer than the entire Major League Baseball season. Can your clients wait that long to close their hybrid network security gaps?

Your clients need help in securing their hybrid networks with a Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) that provides consistent protection, visibility and control across dynamic and distributed environments. Before you deploy your clients’ NGFW, learn how to avoid these five common, yet costly mistakes.

Mistake #1 – Focusing on cloud-based solutions
While your clients may have adopted a cloud-first environment, few organizations have a cloud-only environment in place. Implementing a cloud-only security strategy ignores the security needs of your clients’ employees who work on-premises or at satellite offices. An NGFW addresses the needs of your clients’ entire workforce regardless of their location.

Mistake #2 – Disregarding on-premises data centers
Your clients may plan to migrate their applications to the cloud someday. For now, they must keep these assets in on-premises data centers. They need a security solution that can operate in any environment—not just in the cloud. This starts with a common network firewall platform deployed at every network edge, including campus, data center, branch, private and public clouds and as a cloud-based service for remote and mobile workers.

Mistake #3 – Believing that “Best of breed” is best
Your clients’ IT teams can mistakenly assume that a best-of-breed approach provides better security at the edge. Oftentimes, it just leads to solution sprawl as IT teams implement an average of 45 security tools across their network, mostly from different vendors. This results in network complexity and siloed security architectures that can’t “talk to each other” or share threat intelligence.

Your clients need a coordinated approach built around a common security platform, where actionable threat intelligence is shared across all security devices, and policy can be enforced wherever it is most effective. Having 45 different “best of breed” solutions won’t get you there.

Mistake #4 – Not taking a holistic approach to security
Hybrid networks have many edges, users and vulnerabilities. Additionally, the volume of encrypted traffic is estimated to soon reach 95 percent. Unfortunately, most network firewalls are unable to inspect encrypted traffic while maintaining necessary application performance levels. Your clients need security solutions, including an NGFW, that adapt to the changing dynamics of private and public cloud resources and deliver a consistent end-to-end security across their hybrid IT architectures.

Mistake #5 – Adopting a “Trust everyone” approach
Traditional networks focus on preventing access from the outside yet provide lots of opportunities for hackers to do damage once they breach the perimeter. IT teams need to adopt Zero Trust Access is based on a “trust no one” security approach.

You can steer your clients towards an NGFW solution that provides security beyond the edge by reducing the attack surface through network segmentation which prevents lateral propagation of north-south threats, and micro segmentation to prevent east-west proliferation.

Steer your clients clear of these mistakes and deploy an NGFW platform as the backbone of a unified security strategy. They will have end-to-end visibility, ease of management and control and consistent enforcement across their networks.