The 10 Coolest Cybersecurity Products Of 2015

The Need For Security

As breaches and security threats continued to inundate businesses in all industries in 2015, the need for best-of-breed security solutions has become more clear than ever. Vendors both big and small entered the market with new solutions to capitalize on those trends and help their clients better secure their environments. While this list of products spans the entire security industry, many reflect growing trends in the industry around behavioral analytics, data protection technologies and a push overall toward a platform and solutions-based approach, as opposed to a best-of-breed point solution approach.

Take a look at the CRN list of coolest cybersecurity products from 2015.

Fortinet Internal Network Firewall

Fortinet kicked off the year with the launch of its Internal Network Firewall, which is a line of solutions that essentially creates an additional middle layer in the network for added protection. Available on some FortiGate Firewall appliances, the solution uses an application-specific integrated circuit architecture to block malicious activity and enforce policies. Since its launch, the solution is ’doing better than we even dreamt of,’ Vice President of Americas Channels Joseph Sykora said in a recent interview with CRN. Sykora said the solution creates a new opportunity for partners, as it is an entirely additive sale to existing perimeter and core security technologies.

Keeper Enterprise 2.0

After seeing wild success in the consumer market, Keeper Security took a leap into the enterprise space in September with the launch of Keeper Enterprise 2.0 and its first channel program. The password management and encrypted digital file storage solution looks to capitalize on a growing trend in the market for data security solutions and secure sharing across a variety of devices. The company, based in Chicago, already has more than 5 million consumer subscribers and more than 3,000 business clients, who were added prior to the company’s channel program launch. Now, CEO and co-founder Darren Guccione said the company is looking to move 99 percent of its growing business through its partners.

Check Point SandBlast

Check Point Software Technologies took a shot at the competition in September with the launch of its own advanced threat detection and prevention solution, called SandBlast. In a solution that the company called ’revolutionary,’ SandBlast has two parts, the first of which is Threat Emulation, a zero-day and advanced persistent threat technology that uses an integrated CPU engine to identify attacks at the earliest exploit stage. Second is Threat Extraction technology that preserves the user experience by allowing the end user to read documents immediately by scrubbing or converting the data files while the sandbox and detection engine work on the back end. Both pieces are part of the company’s Next Generation Threat Prevention product family. What makes it different from others on the market is the CPU-level detection engine, which is able to detect more advanced threats.

Exabeam

User behavior analytics is a hot and growing area of security. One company riding the front of that wave is Exabeam, with a solution that it says will ’put a brain on SIEM,’ adding behavioral analytics capabilities that can create patterns of user behavior and pinpoint out-of-the-ordinary activity that could be due to an attack. What makes it different from the other companies entering into security user behavior analytics space is its stateful user tracking and building a timeline of a user's threat movement instead of just sending an alert.

The company goes to market 100 percent through the channel, and also has partnerships with major SIEM vendors. It raised $25 million in Series B funding in September.

Digital Guardian Platform

Data security is taking a front-row seat in the security market. One vendor building a comprehensive, channel-first platform in the space is Digital Guardian, which provides an agent-based DLP solution to protect data on the endpoint. The company protects 52 million TB of data across more than 2 million agents deployed globally. The Waltham, Mass.-based company grew its portfolio significantly this year with the acquisition of Code Green, which expanded its endpoint data loss prevention platform this year to include protection across the network, cloud and mobile devices.

ThreatRespond

An offshoot of Brazilian MSP Arcon, Vijilan Security launched into the North American market this year with a flagship solution called ThreatRespond that is a channel-only service which collects log performance and configuration data from devices within the client network, and sends it to a SIEM in the cloud, where it is then analyzed by security engineers to determine which events need further investigation. From there, the Vijilan engineers will walk MSP partners through what needs to be done to remediate the situation on-site. The company also offers solutions called ThreatDirect and ThreatAnalyze. The white-label offering for MSPs is designed to help them offer a comprehensive suite of security solutions to their clients, without necessarily needing to have extensive security expertise or infrastructure investments in house to provide 24/7 security support.

Magna Active Breach Detection

2015 was a year full of data breaches, and it looks like 2016 is unlikely to be any different. That trend makes a solution like LightCyber’s Magna Active Breach Detection very timely, as it offers an easy-to-deploy breach detection solution that provides actionable steps to remediate any problems found. The company has been gaining high-profile attention for its solution so far this year, landing investments from key investor Shlomo Kramer, who co-founded Check Point Software Technologies and Imperva and was an early investor in Palo Alto Networks and Trusteer. LightCyber also launched its first channel program in August, saying that it wanted to formalize the partner process and foster growth through the channel.

Cato Networks

Launching from stealth this fall, Cato Networks jumped into the market with $20 million in Series A funding and an innovative Network Security as a Service solution. The company said the solution will be the ’next paradigm shift’ in network security by leveraging the cloud to do away with expensive network security appliances and provide an as-a-service platform. The solution is in beta right now and is expected to be generally available in early 2016.

Palo Alto Networks Aperture

In September, Palo Alto Networks expanded its security platform to include coverage for sanctioned Software-as-a-Service applications with the launch of Aperture. The security challenge around SaaS applications like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce and more grows as more applications are moved to the cloud. Aperture, which is delivered as a Security-as-a-Service complement to the company’s Next-Generation Firewall, helps provide visibility, user analysis and control over the data in those applications in order to maintain data policies and prevent advanced threats. The solution is a direct result of Palo Alto Networks’ May acquisition of CirroSecure.

Sophos Security Heartbeat

In November, Sophos launched Sophos Security Heartbeat, which brings together synchronized threat intelligence and automation across both the endpoint and network. For a long time, the network and endpoint have operated independently, either coming from separate vendors or as point solutions. However, Sophos said that approach has proven to no longer be effective, as companies continue to be hit by massive data breaches and threats. By bringing together its next-generation firewall and UTM solutions with its next-generation endpoint technologies under a single umbrella, Sophos said it believes it can improve security across a company’s environment and provide faster detection, improved context and automated response to threats.