CenturyLink announced Tuesday that it has blended Palo Alto Networks' next-generation firewalls into its Security Log Monitoring service.
With digital transformations, as well as new services and applications, network endpoints are proliferating for businesses, which means there's a need for improved firewalls to address the evolving threat landscape.
CenturyLink's Security Log Monitoring (SLM) solution is a security monitoring, threat detection and incident response service designed to help organizations address the often-overlooked threats within their networks, from their premises and their cloud workloads to their remote employees, according to CenturyLink's Chris Smith, vice president of global security services, in an email to FierceTelecom.
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In June, CenturyLink announced it had boosted its Security Log Monitoring platform by blending in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
SLM recognizes hundreds of common log source types, including those from VPNs, firewalls, databases, cloud infrastructure and servers, and it gives customers access to a robust library of advanced algorithms to feed actionable threat intelligence with fewer false positives, Smith said.
"Security Log Monitoring, as our MSS (Managed Security Services) infrastructure, is a virtual machine environment that provides benefits of low latency provisioning and scalability," said Smith. "CenturyLink’s Security Log Monitoring platform manages and monitors a diverse set of Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls with enhanced visibility and threat intelligence capabilities.
"Managed Palo Alto firewalls offer a wide range of intrusion prevention systems throughput, from 610 Mbps to 20 Gbps, and support anti-virus, URL filtering, site-to-site and client VPNs, in addition to application awareness and user identification."
The managed service includes a subscription to CenturyLink’s Security Log Monitoring service, as well as integration with its portal and mobile application.
Prior to Tuesday's announcement, CenturyLink supported existing customers with Palo Alto Networks' firewalls as log sources on SLM before launching it as a standard managed offering. In addition to Managed Palo Alto Firewall, which is available now, CenturyLink's Managed Firewall Service also includes Cisco and Fortinet.
"What’s different about Managed Palo Alto Firewall is that it’s fully integrated with CenturyLink’s Security Log Monitoring service, which brings correlated threat intelligence, cloud security monitoring and rapid threat detection and response capabilities," Smith said. "While we can’t share specific customer names, digital businesses want end-to-end visibility and control over securing their networks without putting additional strain on limited in-house resources, and CenturyLink’s Managed Palo Alto Firewall is one of many solutions we offer to help businesses address those needs."
In addition to better security for digital businesses, there's also more revenue to be gained by offering security as a managed service. According to IDC’s recent "Worldwide Semiannual Security Spending Guide," managed security services will drive a compound annual growth rate of more than 18% for security services this year.
More security on tap for SD-WAN
Smith also said that CenturyLink was focused on delivering firewall, threat detection and mitigation capabilities to its SD-WAN services next year to offer more options to customers that want better security capabilities than standalone SD-WAN offerings. Better security is becoming a differentiator among the 50 plus SD-WAN vendors.
CenturyLink first launched its SD-WAN service in 2015 with Versa Networks, and it also uses Cisco's Meraki SD-WAN technology as part of its managed services offering for enterprises in the U.S.
In October, CenturyLink added to its SD-WAN portfolio with the addition of a managed service that's powered by Cisco's Viptela SD-WAN platform.