Cybersecurity Mesh Holds it All Together

Cybersecurity is a moving target as it continuously evolves. No IT support provider would install security measures and then forget about them for ten years – it just doesn’t work that way. Since cybercriminals never sleep and never stop developing new ways to break into network systems, your IT services team needs to stay on top of things.

You may think that having next-generation firewalls and antivirus will suffice, but that has never been enough. It is a great advantage that commerce can move at the speed of your bandwidth, but it comes with dangers and costs.

In Gartner’s yearly report on the top Information Technology trends and recommendations for 2022, they cited Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CMA) is the #2 strategic trend.

While there are many factors in keeping a network system healthy and safe, security mesh is important in terms of providing proactive maintenance and protection. Nothing works well after a network is compromised or breached, so security remains one of ITFirm.com’s main areas of focus.

What is a Cybersecurity mesh?

In a nutshell, it is a strategy used for cyber defense that separately secures each device such as firewalls and network protection tools with its own perimeter. Common among security strategies is the use a single perimeter for the entire IT environment.

The best analogy is to think of your network as a castle. The old line of defense was to have a thick stone wall around the perimeter, and maybe a moat. Once the outer wall is breached, attackers can easily access any area within the wall.

A security mesh adds to the outer wall with independent, scalable protections for each area inside. The kitchen does not need the same level of security as the armory or the King’s quarters. This is a way of putting your protections where they are most needed, and not enabling the collapse of one to be intertwined with the collapse of another.

For ‘Lord of the Rings’ fans, it’s akin to the seven walls of Gondor, each one of which the enemy must battle through with a tiring army, while those inside fall back to fresh defenses.

This approach is a break from the old fully centralized IT model to a more modular setup. Overall security policy management is still centralized, but security enforcement is distributed to each individual department within the company for administration. It allows for smaller individual perimeters with degrees of access and security to be based on the sensitivity of that department’s data and the conditional accesses granted to employees.

Simply put, this eliminates the old pattern that, once a network is breached, the hackers are free to go anywhere and everywhere they want. Now crooks find that once they manage to get in, their highest value targets are still a ways off and protected by the highest security.

Zero Trust: The Ruling Principle

Zero Trust (ZT) is nothing new. In 2009, the concept was created by John Kindervag of Forrester Research. It is based on the simple notion that trust is a weakness. He posited that security measures must be designed with a strategy of “Never trust, always verify.” In the past, certain high-level executives did not have to bother with the authentications that lower-level employees did. The problem is: What happens when the network identities and credentials of those high-level executives with ‘easy’ access are compromised?

Despite early resistance from organizations that felt it was too cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming, Zero Trust has steadily gained favor and acceptance as a ‘must have.’

If the Charlotte IT Support community is representative of the global attitude towards Zero Trust, IT services worldwide would have been championing ZT to their clients from day one. If the network is breached or brought down by Ransomware, who cares how easy access used to be?

Zero Trust is not a single technology, but a mindset, a strategic philosophy – a set of policies and procedures that allow no one inside or outside an organization to be granted access to any network resource or device without rigorous and continuing authentication and verification. Anyone attempting to gain access is guilty until proven innocent.

Those websites and apps that compel you to enter your phone number so that a code can be texted to you – and which you must enter before access is granted – are examples of the Zero Trust standard at work. Most smart IT services providers are well beyond demanding a simple password to gain entry. Multi-Factor Authentication should be the norm, although many organizations are slow to add this to their security arsenal.

With comprehensive Zero Trust architecture in place, micro-perimeters are set up around sensitive areas of data, and CMA is a key component. Zero Trust is the strategy and CMA is an important tactic.