Achieving visibility for better cybersecurity
By Ashish Shah, Senior Solution Architect, Dasher Technologies
Catastrophic data breaches now seem like a daily occurance. Ninety-two percent of malware is still delivered by email. Eighty-one percent of network intrusions leverage stolen or weak credentials. It typically takes 191 days — more than 6 months — for organizations to identify data breaches. As we all know, there is no shortage of frightening statistics keeping IT departments up at night. As the cyber threat landscape intensifies, IT leaders are now tasked with creating a targeted, holistic approach to cybersecurity.
According to Forrester: “In response to increasingly frequent and complex cyberattacks, security pros are devoting resources to ever-more granular aspects of their networks. This is necessary, but it’s also a great way to lose sight of your ultimate goal: protecting customers and empowering your business.” A Zero Trust philosophy helps focus the fight.
Dasher’s defense-in-depth principals
Dasher’s Zero Trust architecture approach covers your most critical cybersecurity needs. Here’s our three-point plan for IT leaders exploring new cyber defense strategies:
1. Don’t trust anyone
The concept of “Zero Trust” was popularized by Forrester in 2010, to describe eradicating “the idea of a trusted network inside a defined corporate perimeter.” Previously, companies tended to build cybersecurity programs under the assumption that their corporate networks were secure, which we now know is not the case in reality.
Start with the premise that you aren’t going to trust anyone, inside or outside the network. Allow only discriminating access and only to needed resources. Everything is always locked down. With nearly every device connected to the internet, Zero Trust ensures that infiltrators from the digital world at large don’t gain lateral access to everything in your internal network. It also mitigates internal threats and serves as a standard to protect and regulate access to sensitive systems and data. Blindly allowing internal users to access everything without identity checks and authorization mechanisms negates the entire security stack.
2. Know your network
Zero Trust requires visibility. You have to understand your network to know if it something is amiss. Dasher helps clients achieve true visibility across enterprise networks, detecting every device and keeping watch on traffic patterns. Dasher’s expert engineers deploy monitoring tools that give you visibility into what happens on your network under what circumstances. It’s the smartest way to build an informed cyber-defense strategy.
Surprisingly, most organizations have no clear concept of typical network behavior, or where there are atypical gaps. For example, sometimes engineering DevOps departments take actions that circumvent IT purview. True network visibility into your entire network shows what is and isn’t happening and what is and isn’t working. This validation provides IT departments with a clear understanding of network operation and helps executives better assess their cybersecurity resources.
3. Reinforce security best practices
From startups to Fortune 500 companies, Zero Trust is relevant to businesses of all sizes. But there is overhead involved with implementing a Zero Trust architecture. For this reason, small-to-midsize businesses benefit the most from implementing Zero Trust because the scope of resources involved is still manageable and cost-effective, and best practices can be reinforced with growth.
Dasher often helps startups that are transitioning into mid-size companies. One Silicon Valley client was recently experiencing incredible growth and moving to a hybrid cloud architecture. While our engineers were addressing its data center and multi-cloud environment, we also implemented our Zero Trust approach. Dasher engineers helped its IT department assess its cybersecurity needs and establish role-based network access control and user rights assignments to ensure network integrity moving forward.
Establishing a Zero Trust Policy
Dasher deploys easy-to-manage, secure, and cost-effective security solutions. Our cybersecurity programs start with key questions: What are your biggest security worries? What is keeping you awake at night? We make sure your vulnerabilities are addressed with solutions that scale.
Dasher’s systematic approach to Zero Trust architecture leverages state-of-the-art cybersecurity best practices to secure your network. It also serves as a game plan for healthy IT by providing a clear and strategic policy to champion cybersecurity within your organization.