Forescout Technologies, Inc. announced a strategic partnership with Arista Networks to reduce cybersecurity risks brought on by explosive growth of IoT devices, increased network complexity and propagation of malware. The partnership includes the development of a unique open ecosystem that embeds security within the network fabric and delivers full visibility and enforcement of critical enterprise assets.

"Forescout and Arista are transforming network security with policy-driven segmentation and least privilege access across Arista and heterogeneous environments without proprietary vendor lock-in," said Pedro Abreu, chief product and strategy officer, Forescout. "This is a natural and organic partnership where, together, we will provide Zero Trust security and compliance from device to network with visibility, analytics and automation."

Through this new collaboration, Forescout integrates directly to and is certified on Arista's switches and wireless infrastructure, including the new line of Arista Cognitive Campus PoE switches. Forescout also supports Arista's network-wide workload orchestration and workflow automation solution CloudVision. Further, co-innovation is underway in the context of a Zero Trust architecture to identify IoT devices and ensure they are assigned to specific segments in order to reduce risk and prevent anomalous behavior.

"The exponential growth and diversity of non-traditional devices on enterprise networks has drastically increased the attack surface. While these devices provide rich data, improve productivity, and create new services, cyber criminals are exploiting them as an entryway to deploy ransomware attacks and other threats that can have a severe impact on operations," said Robyn Westervelt, research director, security & trust, IDC. "We see access enforcement and network segmentation as critical defenses to manage IoT security risk."

With the proliferation of IoT devices, the need for Zero Trust security is increasingly critical to contain outbreaks and control access. The integration of Forescout's device visibility and control platform with Arista's software-defined networking (SDN) architecture will address these challenges at enterprise scale and deliver complete visibility, threat detection, and dynamic segmentation.

"Forescout has proven holistic device visibility and control in today's dynamic IoT environments in multivendor networks," said Anshul Sadana, chief operating officer, Arista Networks. "Network speed and resilience need the active security defense that Forescout's agentless solution provides."