Strategies to Protect Distributed Infrastructures in a Hybrid World

Strategies to Protect Distributed Infrastructures in a Hybrid World

Despite the excitement around the remote work shift, ‘work from anywhere’ has not created in any new security risks. Instead, with a distributed workforce, it has resulted in continuing to address the issues that firms are already aware of, and sweeping under the carpet!

The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced a shift to digital media as organizations moved their operations online. Companies have never been more linked or reliant on the availability of websites and online services than they are right now. This massive upheaval prompted enormous activity across the global threat environment as threat actors pounced on vulnerabilities unveiled by the global crisis and developed attack vectors that poke at the weak areas of the new reality.

However, today’s difficulty is that communication paths and, with them, data traffic paths are frequently found outside of the corporate network. As a result, securing them is incredibly difficult, at least using legacy techniques.

As a result, businesses should combine the new normal of work with a new normal of security. As a starting point, CISOs and their teams should focus on the three categories below, which are all crucial to the security of dispersed infrastructures.

Also Read: Safeguarding the World’s Critical Cyber-Physical Systems with Confidential Computing

Zero trust and least privilege

Employees are increasingly working beyond the protective ‘castle walls’ of a corporate network in modern work-from-anywhere infrastructures. As a result, securing resource access at the network level is no longer feasible.

Instead, security teams should concentrate on the application level and adhere to the “least privilege” approach, which limits access to end-users based on their responsibilities and usage context.

Furthermore, a “zero trust” approach means that the security infrastructure does not automatically trust a user following a successful login. It also keeps track of the  activity of the device as well as the activities of the logged-in user account. This continuous monitoring is best implemented in the cloud in distributed contexts.

Monitoring with artificial intelligence

Businesses invest a lot of money into prevention but not enough into timely defense against ongoing threats. As a result, companies should rebalance their defenses today. This entails monitoring what’s happening on the network in near-real-time.

Basic endpoint and user behavior monitoring, on the other hand, will miss all of these threats if they only verify whether an access request matches a specified user profile. Rather, it’s critical to compare current occurrences to a user’s previous behavior patterns on a regular basis.

Here’s where AI and machine learning (ML) can really shine: The data obtained during a learning phase is automatically abstracted by ML-based security monitoring software, which issues an immediate warning as soon as departures from the automatically calculated baseline signal suspicious activity.

Also Read: Three Critical Factors for Keeping Enterprises Safe from Cyber Threats

Cloud services and applications

Security teams should and will continue to prioritize application and cloud security. This will increasingly entail protecting against targeted hacking, application-level DDoS attacks, and attacks on web application and cloud service programming interfaces.

For these goals, Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solutions and Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are used.

More and more firms are designing new apps as cloud-native applications, that is, container workloads with Kubernetes orchestration, as part of their digitization initiatives. To integrate these new enterprise cloud infrastructures, WAAP solutions and ADCs should also be accessible in the containerized form in today’s hybrid multi-cloud world.

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