Device security platform provider Armis and cloud visibility and analytics pioneer Gigamon have announced a joint solution designed to enable organisations to reduce business risk and increase security through real-time and continuous protection for managed, unmanaged, and IoT devices.

While agent-based security approaches may effectively protect many critical assets on traditional networks, these approaches do little to secure unmanaged, IoT, OT, and medical devices, which are inherently more vulnerable due to a lack of robust security and patching difficulties.

As a result, agentless IoT devices have become an attractive attack target for cybercriminals, posing a significant and growing security risk as adoption increases.

According to Gartner, "Application, cloud, data, endpoint, network and infrastructure security technologies must work together to keep ever-changing organisations secure. A dynamic and adaptable architecture is necessary to support end users located anywhere in the world in connecting from any device, accessing resources on-premises and in the cloud."

Also, a new forecast from IDC estimates that there will be 41.6 billion connected IoT devices, or 'things', generating 79.4 zettabytes of data by 2025, resulting in a widening threat vector that bad actors are keen to exploit as adoption surges.

The Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric and the Armis Agentless Device Security Platform will work together to provide full visibility into all traffic across hybrid networks.

With Gigamon, organisations are empowered to gain pervasive hybrid cloud visibility, equipping Armis with access to relevant traffic to assure stronger security, compliance, and business continuity.

"As cloud complexity abounds and cyber threats continue to skyrocket across the enterprise, the need for simple, comprehensive device visibility and security has never been more essential to deliver on everyday business objectives," says Peter Doggart, chief strategy officer at Armis.

"With this new joint solution, agentless security meets unmatched cloud visibility, so organisations are better prepared to manage asset inventory, regulate compliance efforts, enhance threat detection and more."

"Elastic visibility and analytics for the hybrid cloud are at the forefront of what we do at Gigamon. Now, coupled with Armis' industry-leading agentless security platform, organisations will be even better prepared to mitigate malicious cyber activity all the way from unmanaged IoT devices to the public cloud," says Michael Dickman, chief product officer at Gigamon.

With this new joint solution, Armis and Gigamon customers will be better equipped to:

• Gain visibility of unmanaged, IoT, OT, and medical devices
• Reduce business and compliance risk with continuous, real-time device vulnerability and behavioural risk assessments 
• Align NetOps and SecOps teams using comprehensive device and network data
• Automatically detect and respond to suspicious or malicious device behaviour