A cybersecurity platform is a collection of solutions and capabilities that help secure applications, APIs, and AI services. Organizations employ numerous interconnected — and often centrally managed — security layers to safeguard data and traffic. The goal is to prevent intrusion, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other threats listed within the OWASP Top Ten (and beyond).
Cybersecurity platforms help organizations reduce fragmentation. A single platform can simultaneously replace multiple security-focused point solutions, which instead function as individual and self-contained tools. While a piecemeal approach to security might offer more flexibility, distinct tools might not integrate well with each other nor share important runtime data. They also add complexity by shipping with their own management suites.
The process of creating or implementing a cybersecurity platform is sometimes called "cybersecurity platformization." Choosing the ideal platform for your environment requires planning to assess any weaknesses in your existing setup (if already in place), clarify any aspirational goals (such as specific regulatory compliance or incident reduction), understand initial learning curves, and make any budget-conscious decisions.
How do cybersecurity platforms work?
Cybersecurity platforms aim to unite security and monitoring across cloud services while boosting visibility across your environment. Much like service discovery solutions continuously maintain catalogs of active services, cybersecurity platforms give teams a sweeping view of client behavior. They also compile performance metrics such as latency, throughput, bandwidth consumption, and others to ensure applications are running their best.
Teams are turning away from tool-specific monitoring dashboards, firewalls, and alerting mechanisms. Many view centralization as the pathway to lower complexity and deeper insights. From inspecting crashes to threat responses, there's immense value in viewing everything in one place.
This goes beyond solely monitoring. Teams can use their chosen cybersecurity platform to configure and enforce strict security controls. They don't just get a read-only GUI — they get a command center from which they can directly interact with web clients, endpoint devices, and critical infrastructure components.
The three pillars of cybersecurity
There are generally three categories of security that cybersecurity platforms help enforce:
Network security – Involves protecting networking equipment and virtual network infrastructure components from attacks, abuse, and unauthorized access. Network security relies on a convergence of technologies, specialized teams, and processes to keep data safe. It also means protecting internal systems against accidental breaches due to misuse.
Endpoint security – Involves securing devices and other virtual components that share data across the greater network. This includes mobile devices, laptops, servers, printers, and IoT devices — but also virtual machines (VMs), containers, applications, and cloud services (APIs, databases, etc.). Because endpoints communicate freely amongst one another and are numerous, locking them down is a high priority.
Application security – Involves protecting application infrastructure, services, backend APIs (especially for microservices architectures), against a myriad of threats. These attacks might attempt to steal or destroy data, cause denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS), gain unauthorized access, and similar outcomes. Chaos and other testing procedures (such as fuzzing) are key to hardening applications before they reach production. Cybersecurity platforms help teams monitor the results of these tests in real time.
To uphold all three types of security, organizations need a cybersecurity platform with most or all of the following capabilities:
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) – These systems monitor connected devices for suspicious behavior indicative of abuse, attack, or various types of bot activity. This also includes protection against growing malware or ransomware threats.
Threat detection and analytics – This involves continuous monitoring for suspicious client behavioral patterns to find both signature-based and non-signature-based security threats. Threat detection features typically establish a baseline or "profile" of expected behavior, compare client activity against those parameters, and can automatically enact response policies based on a number of factors.
Centralized management – A centralized control plane with awareness of the entire network and application ecosystem makes it easy to monitor, manage, and even automate many key security tasks. This includes configuration, threat responses, remediation recommendations, log exploration, and other features necessary for regulatory compliance.
Identity and access management (IAM) – Teams need a system in place with which they can easily add, modify, or revoke access permissions to certain resources, verify identities per device, and otherwise keep sensitive information locked away from prying eyes.
Automation – From alerting to security responses, a cybersecurity platform can reduce the need for human action when issues arise. The platform might block suspicious IP addresses, send probable bots to a honeypot, push out security patches, and more to combat bad actors.
What are the benefits of a cybersecurity platform?
Cybersecurity platforms are the convergence of visibility, control, and analytics. Here's how these platforms can help organizations of all sizes stay secure and compliant:
They replace human intervention with automation when problems arise. This leads to quicker remediation that's often less error prone.
Consolidation means easier maintenance and security monitoring. 59% of Splunk survey respondents attributed faster response times to unified platforms, while 46% spend more time maintaining fragmented tools vs. actually defending their organization.
Consolidation also means cost savings. A unified platform is typically much cheaper than using multiple tools, which may also require complex subscriptions or vendor lock-in.
They improve threat detection accuracy through multi-layered security, data analytics, and technologies such as AI/ML.
They make it easier to dig into logs, perform security audits, and assess other compliance-related requirements all within one place.
It's worth noting that a given cybersecurity platform might not include all of these features or benefits, but instead a combination of them. While unified tools are extremely useful, it may still be necessary to add supplemental tooling to fill any niche gaps, depending on your use case(s).
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Does HAProxy include a cybersecurity platform?
Yes! HAProxy One — the world's fastest application delivery and security platform — is built from the ground up with advanced, multi-layered security. Teams can centrally manage everything with HAProxy Fusion Control Plane, including response policies, real-time security responses for bots and suspicious clients, global and per-app security configurations, detailed logs, and more. HAProxy Fusion also lets you streamline IAM via RBAC, with support for Microsoft Active Directory, Entra ID, and OpenID Connect.
Security teams can oversee the full stack from a single interface, including the Security Control Plane, HAProxy Enterprise WAF, Bot Management, global rate limiting, and other core security features.
To see how HAProxy One strengthens security and simplifies operations in real world environments, book a demo with our team.