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“Improvements in network security manageability are more than theory. Several companies have made notable strides across all three phases of management evolution - visibility, implementation and automation – and ForeScout ranks among them,” said Frank Dickson, industry principal analyst, network security at Frost & Sullivan. “ForeScout’s CounterACT platform and the advancement of its ControlFabric architecture enable greater opportunity for customers and partners to materially advance security management.”

According to a recent Frost & Sullivan survey of 12,396 information security professionals, 75 percent “believe network monitoring and intelligence will provide significant improvements to system and network security.” The message from the marketplace is clear: administrators of security technologies need tools that simplify and automate the task of managing security. Organisations need to think beyond reacting to exposures and explore technical mechanisms that better leverage their existing infrastructure and arsenal of point security products. As such, security platforms must provide greater visibility, context and integrated management functionality across multiple security technologies. ForeScout’s CounterACT platform, which provides visibility, control and mitigation, and its ControlFabric architecture, which enables interoperability between network and security infrastructure, deliver such network security innovation today.1

“We are honoured that Frost & Sullivan has distinguished ForeScout as an innovator and leader in network security,” said Gord Boyce, chief executive officer at ForeScout. “Organisations are looking for greater visibility, more responsive control and a means to yield better returns from their security investments. We encourage IT management to request a demonstration to see first-hand how ForeScout can be a game changer for their organisation.”

In October 2013, ForeScout extended its CounterACT platform with an open, standards-based communication architecture, referred to as ControlFabric. ControlFabric technology, which has been evolving since 2008, provides bi-directional interfaces and protocols for “visibility, intelligence and remediation” across multiple network, security and management tool sets. The ControlFabric architecture allows developers, customers and system integrators to integrate their network, security and management applications into ForeScout’s network security platform.

CounterACT can securely share its real-time endpoint intelligence with other systems to enhance context within their controls, and conversely, external systems can provide CounterACT greater operational context. In addition, these systems can also send information and instructions to CounterACT to take network enforcement and endpoint remediation action. As a result, visibility of network security data from multiple security tools is enabled and can trigger (automatically or on demand by the operator) proactive network security changes implemented through policy-based controls. 2