For decades, IT and operational technology/industrial control systems (OT/ICS) were seen as separate entities within organizations. In keeping with practices first defined by the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture, the two systems were entirely air gapped to never impact one another. While this separation kept OT networks more protected, it is no longer practical.

Insufficiently protected open ports can put your IT environment at serious risk. Threat actors often seek to exploit open ports and their applications through spoofing, credential sniffing and other techniques. For example, in 2017, cybercriminals spread WannaCry ransomware by exploiting an SMB vulnerability on port 445. Other examples include the ongoing campaigns targeting Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) service running on port 3389.

Security transformation doesn’t succeed without network transformation. The two go hand-in-hand when it comes to building the secure access service edge (SASE) architecture of the future, and if security degrades the network experience, or the network experience bypasses security, each of those trade-offs introduces more risk to the enterprise—it doesn’t have to be that way.