Cybersecurity Mesh: Security Perimeters around individuals. What is it, and how can it be used in IT Development?
According to Gartner, “The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the multi-decade process of turning the digital enterprise inside out,” We’ve passed a tipping point — most organisational cyber assets are outside the traditional physical and logical security perimeters. As anywhere operations continue, the technology called “Cybersecurity Mesh,” will become the most practical approach to ensure secure access to, and use of, cloud-based applications and distributed data from uncontrolled devices.” Therefore, the only foolproof solution to ensure safety and security while accessing information from any device, anywhere, is ‘Cybersecurity Mesh.’
With remote working becoming the ‘New Normal,’ the enterprises will be working in a geographically distributed environment of workers, vendors, partners, and customers. As anywhere operations are increasingly becoming ‘de jure’ and the cyber threat is at a rise concomitantly. Ensuring reliable, flexible and scalable cybersecurity control is now becoming a necessity for all enterprises. This growing vital security trend comes as more and more assets are currently existing outside the traditional security perimeter. A robust cybersecurity mesh enables the security perimeter to be defined around an object or a person’s identity. This security strategy enables as responsive, modular security approach by centralising the policy orchestration and distributing policy enforcement.
Developing the concept of cybersecurity mesh may be a much-needed revolution, ensuring sensitive data safety in the times of intensified remote work. Cybersecurity Mesh is a broader concept that involves a wider network of nodes. More specifically, a Cybersecurity Mesh consists in designing and implementing an IT security infrastructure that does not focus on building a single ‘perimeter’ around all devices or nodes of an IT network, but instead establishes smaller, individual perimeters around each device or access point. This creates a modular and more responsive security architecture covering physically disparate access points of the network.
Need for the Cybersecurity Meshes by the Enterprises: If your resources and assets are located anywhere, your protection needs to extend there as well. If your resources or critical infrastructure are located outside the traditional perimeter, so are the organisation’s critical documentation and assets. The enterprise’s key assets or resources can now easily lie outside the organisation’s logical and physical boundaries. The enterprise security infrastructure now needs to be agile enough to cover the resources working on the organisation’s IP (intellectual property) from his or her home. This sort of flexibility in the enterprise security infrastructure can only be realised by decoupling policy decision and enforcement. The new tracing line of security will then, by necessity, be redrawn around the identity rather than the traditional physical or logical boundaries. This will ensure the right people have access to the ‘Right Information,’ across the network – No matter where the information or the resources are located. This means that once the policy is defined – say, a three-tiered information access protocol for all employees – the same rules would apply for information access no matters who tries to access them or where they might be located in the network.
Cybersecurity Mesh is a building block of ‘Zero Trust’ environments – The “moat and castle” model of security protection doesn’t work in an environment in which 34% of data leaks or breaches originate within the network. Perimeter security fails because it works on the old-world notion of the inside is safe and outside is dangerous. Even with a ‘trust but verify’ approach, we end up trusting a lot more than we actually should monitor or verify. Moreover, in the current highly complex collaborative environment, enterprise data, however sensitive is highly mobile and needs to remain accessible to a host of different collaborations and secure from unauthorised access or breach of trust. Zero-trust cybersecurity is adaptable to emerging threats and changing access needs; it can detect threats in real-time and take immediate action to protect an enterprise’s data, devices and operations in ways reused passwords VPNs no longer can. A security mesh helps implement zero-trust end-to-end in the network by ensuring all the data, systems, equipment, etc. are accessed securely regardless of where they might be located. All connections to access the data are considered unreliable unless verified.
Gartner predicts that cybersecurity mesh will support over half of digital access control requests in the next five years. The access will be based entirely on identity and the levels of access associated with it. This would make policy enforcement location-agnostic, irrespective of where the data travels. As more and more corporate assets get digitised, and organisations move entirely to the cloud computing environment, the cybersecurity mesh will provide a greater protection level than most physical boundaries.
Let us understand, how will IT development be affected by Cybersecurity Mesh? – The ‘password-protected’ approach to IT security is moving towards a slow but sure sunset with the rise of complex cyber-attacks that can use any techniques, including Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to figure out weak links and passwords. Cybersecurity mesh is more likely to be integrated right into the network or platform development. This is especially important since Big Data Analytics grows to play a more significant role in collecting business intelligence from data in any business. Organisations that use customised website or software solutions for employee management and communication or customer interaction would want to reduce the risk of unauthorised access to any user’s data or device. Cybersecurity mesh could play a massive role in ensuring overall protection in such cases irrespective of the device’s security environment.
Those organisations planning to implement the security mesh from the initial stages should get the developer to implement the mesh right from the planning stage to ensure the steps are taken to mitigate their networks’ threats. Cybersecurity Mesh can establish a more flexible, robust, and modular approach to network security. Ensuring each node has its own perimeter, which allows IT, network managers, to maintain better and keep track of differentiated levels of access to different parts of a given network, and prevent hackers from exploiting a given node’s weakness access the broader network. According to the market research, “The global cybersecurity market size was estimated at USD 156.45 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 326.36 billion by 2027 growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.0%.”
To summarise, the key factors driving the market growth include the vulnerable data on computer or web and the loopholes in emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things and Big data and deployment of the cybersecurity solutions across industries such as Financial institutions, Retail, and IT sectors. The past few years have witnessed a dramatic expansion in devices’ complexity and several processes connected to the internet – collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT). With the proliferation of devices and activity on the internet, hackers’ number of potential access points to steal data has increased. As the security of an IT system is only as strong as its weakest link, this situation has resulted in the new IT security approach – “Cybersecurity Mesh.”
