Digital transformation optimizes business processes in order to deliver the highest value to customers. For digital transformation to be successful, businesses must have the resilience, speed and agility to keep pace with evolving security threats.
Organizations are turning to a variety of solutions to secure their highly distributed architectures. In other words, adding more complexity on top of complexity. This sets digital transformation back rather than forward and results in a widening exposure to threats.
One security incident can completely destroy a company’s entire digital infrastructure, financial framework and reputation. Digital transformation must therefore capitalize on cybersecurity best practices. With a properly functioning Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA), you can guarantee safe, authorized access across your entire digital ecosystem.
What Is CSMA?
According to Gartner, CSMA is “a flexible, composable architecture that integrates widely distributed and disparate security services.” Based on that definition, CSMA as a security approach to digital transformation, has the potential to consolidate the organizations’ security tools and bring them closer to the assets that they protect.
Most organizations operate in silos, representing a center of focus and expertise. This often leads to a security sprawl that makes management difficult, disrupts visibility, and impedes an organization’s ability to act effectively to cyber threats.
CSMA enables the distributed enterprise to deploy and extend security where it is most needed. Expounding on the mesh concept – CSMA is not a security solution or a product. It is an integrated security strategy that organizations can adopt. It facilitates digital transformation by embedding security into business processes, enabling a collaborative and dynamic response to cyber attacks.
How CSMA Works?
With CSMA, organizations can deploy security solutions that work seamlessly together with a centralized authority that manages all the security perimeters. According to Gartner, CSMA provides this collaborative cybersecurity structure via four different layers.
Layer 1 – Analytics and Intelligence
Combines different security tools’ data and insight to deliver deep threat analyses and the correct response to cyberattacks. It has also a distributed identity fabric, a layer that provides critical identity services to manage increasing assets, devices, and identities.
Security analytics and intelligence describes a layer of various security tools, all of which communicate with each other. In conjunction with the individual security perimeter around every user and device, UEBA tools work to detect behavioral anomalies, reduce insider attacks, and gain contextual data for further investigation.
Layer 2 – Distributed Identity Fabric
Denotes a layer composed of data and connected processes. Within this layer, analytics tools continuously assess data points from disparate applications; these tools not only actively recommend where data should be used and modified, but they also help to differentiate between genuine, approved users and malicious attackers.
Layer 3 – Consolidated Policy And Posture Management
Is the layer through which IT personnel can define application access policies for users and devices — all from a central location.
These layers, which can be thought of as the “data security mesh,” all exist beneath the network layer; put differently, they work together to monitor where data is used, stored, and shared by every user and device in the network. With a properly functioning CSMA, one can guarantee safe, authorized access to data from any access point.
Layer 4 – Consolidated Dashboards
Offers a composite view across all security endpoints, enabling security teams to respond more quickly and more effectively to security events
Why UDT Secure?
Users, devices, applications and data have left the traditional office and data center. In the post-pandemic world of work, the perimeter no longer exists. The distributed environment that supports access from everywhere, makes it difficult to separate benign from malicious activity. A security-first approach to digital transformation provides trusted access by your workforce, clients, business partners and things.
For example, your security and identity deployments consist of multiple tools that often are not fully integrated. In some cases, there are multiple tools that may duplicate supporting functions. Operating these tools requires many separate dashboards, multiple policy administration points and maintaining many ad hoc integrations. This problem is exacerbated when new security or identity needs surface and new categories of tools are invented. There are too many separate tools with too many separate dashboards.
This complexity increases risk to the company’s digital infrastructure from evolving threats. UDT’s solutions enable stand-alone tools to work together in complementary ways to improve overall security posture by standardizing the way the tools interconnect.
By adopting the CSMA security-first approach to digital transformation, UDT Secure protects the infrastructure by embedding security protocols in all business activities whether they’re on-premises, in data centers or in the cloud.
This provides business leader with a sustainable model that enables them to:
- Reduce deployment times and security failures
- Increase agility and resilience
- Focus on higher-value endeavors
