Cybersecurity Conferences

Continual disruption has pushed organizations toward a distributed infrastructure, with critical IT assets going beyond physical boundaries and traditional security measures. In this exposed environment, there can be many vulnerable access points that hackers can exploit. A cybersecurity mesh architecture is a composable and scalable approach to effectively offset such security-related concerns.

Cybersecurity mesh creates a foundational fabric for flexible security tools to interoperate and participate in a common environment and share security intelligence. Instead of building a common perimeter around all devices or nodes of a network, it provides security at a granular level by building individual perimeters for each access point.

With the major pivot to remote work resulting in technical and cultural changes, “identity first security” is now a reality, and organizations need to shift from traditional setups. Managing and monitoring identities have become critical in remote and distributed environments, where users can access systems from anywhere and at any given time. Besides spending money on technologies like biometrics, multi-factor identification and single sign-on, organizations need to invest in identifying potential hackers who can attack this infrastructure.

In the 2020 CISO Effectiveness Survey, Gartner found that 78% of CISOs have 16 or more tools in their cybersecurity vendor portfolio; 12% have 46 or more. With so many tools at their disposal, security leaders are showing interest in vendor consolidation to reduce integration costs and streamline security operations. In fact, 80% of IT organizations plan to consolidate vendors over the next three years. Vendor consolidation strategies require at least two years to yield meaningful results.

As digital business continues to grow and result in more nonhuman entities, an enterprise-wide strategy to manage machine identities across hybrid and multi-cloud environments is vital. Included in machine identities are workloads (containers, applications, services) and devices (mobile devices, desktop computers, IoT/OT devices). Machine identity management ensures that the interaction between a machine and other entities (such as devices, applications, cloud services or gateways) remains foolproof and trustworthy.

Remote work is a new, expected reality that has been largely accepted.  According to the 2021 Gartner CIO Survey, 64% of employees can work from home, and 40% are actually working from home. This shift in work requires organizations to leverage security tools and architectures suitable for a modern remote workspace. Security teams need to zero in on technologies that can provide appropriate security levels to remote assets without affecting productivity. They must also consider securing, managing and monitoring employees who are off-LAN.