How to Secure a Perimeter-less Environment
As IT teams continue to make adjustments in their cybersecurity policies, how can they set themselves up for success?
Planning ahead, IT decision makers need to re-think their approach to traditional networking and security practices, and consider a shift toward SDN technologies, zero-trust architectures, artificial intelligence, and automation. The first step is to know the environment and understand risk. Organizations should have a clear view into all assets, corporate data, PII information, applications and systems–whether on the network, in the cloud or a home user device. This requires having the right tools, analytics and skillset to achieve. We have all seen in the news multiple organizations that were impacted due to cyberattacks that resulted in data breaches due to unpatched servers and ransomware payouts where social engineering vulnerabilities were exploited. This comes down to taking a holistic and proactive approach to mitigating the continuously evolving threat landscape.
As businesses continue on their digital transformation journey, what are some key security policies that they need to consider?
We are in a new era of technology, where the modern workforce is increasingly more mobile (i.e., hybrid workforce), applications are continuing to migrate to the cloud, and more SaaS platforms are being utilized. All of this drives a demand for increased bandwidth at the business edge and the home. Organizations are looking for a more efficient, optimal and secure way to manage their traffic flows. Secure SD-WAN and XDR technologies are reshaping the enterprise. They are the next evolution in networking and security by delivering application-level path selection, automation over a secure architecture and automated threat response. This requires an end-to-end security model that focuses on cybersecurity with a high-performance internet breakout design that includes branch edge, cloud and endpoint security that tie back to intelligent automated platforms, and analysts for threat detection, response and containment.
How have cloud-based services and direct to cloud impacted cybersecurity posture management?
Protecting corporate data is a critical component of a strong cybersecurity strategy. This comes down to understanding where corporate data resides, who accesses the data and how the data is accessed. Both the network design and security posture come into play. Designing the cloud environment with the right network architecture depends on who needs to access the environment and how they are accessing the information. For example, we would design the network and security policies differently on a public cloud infrastructure than we would on a private cloud infrastructure–focusing on delivering a robust, multi-cloud security model that encompasses a holistic view across all users, systems, applications, and traffic flows in a perimeter-less networking environment.
When considering SaaS platforms such as file storage or customer relationship management solutions, it is worthwhile assessing cloud access security broker (CASB) solutions to enforce security policies to help prevent data exfiltration or unauthorized access to corporate data, protect against malware and gain visibility into the SaaS/Cloud environment. Other technologies include SDN, micro-segmentation and XDR solutions for cybersecurity intelligence and automation across the enterprise.
This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.
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