Use Layered Security Features

Zero trust architecture

This architecture aims to reduce the surface area for attack by implementing layered controls. Rather than treating a network as a trusted space where everything inside has access and focusing on securing the perimeter, this model puts in place controls at the application and user level. It verifies anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access.

Containers

A container is a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to the other. Cybersecurity architectures that use containers package software into standardized units for development, shipment, and deployment. This ensures that software always runs the same regardless of the infrastructure. Using a container architecture allows security protections such as firewalls and other hardening tools to be implemented at the application layer. Security operations personnel can focus on proactively eliminating vulnerabilities before they deploy containers. In addition, containers can be made immutable, so that even if an attacker breaches one they will be unable to install or modify software to do their bidding.

Microservice architecture

Traditionally, many organizations used monolithic architectures that put all of the functionality of an application into a single process. This meant that scaling the application required replicating the whole thing. Microservices, on the other hand, structure an application as a collection of loosely coupled services, organized around business capabilities. This enables the continuous delivery and deployment of large complex applications, and helps avoid single points of failure and large-scale outages. Each microservice is responsible for a single feature. Similar to containers, instead of having one monolithic system, microservices allow you to build and operate scalable, distributed applications securely. However, it can be harder to secure transactions and distributed communications. This architecture requires developers to play a much more active role embedding security policies when building and deploying applications. In particular, microservices require extra leg work in terms of access control checks.

Event-driven architecture

This type of architecture uses events to trigger and communicate between decoupled services, and is common in modern applications built with microservices. An event can be defined as a significant change in state. This type of architecture responds to actions generated by the user or the system. For example, when a consumer purchases an item online, the item’s state changes from “for sale” to “sold”, this is an event. This type of architecture enables services to be scaled, updated, and deployed independently. It also means that if one service has a failure, the rest will keep running. This architecture provides a centralized location to audit your application and define policies, and can restrict which users and resources have permission to access your data. It also enables encryption in transit and at rest.

Cybersecurity fabrics

A cybersecurity fabric is an architectural approach to security, enabled by open standards and protocols, that allows an organization to connect and leverage different security capabilities into a unified and coordinated security response capability. Typically, fabric solutions can be easily extended across diverse technology solutions across the organization with third-party integrations all managed within one tool. This is a great benefit when dealing with a large, complex IT environment made up of many different systems that may not easily talk to one another. The fabric provides improved visibility and management of the IT environment. A fabric approach to security assumes that attacks will be successful and cannot be averted. It emphasizes minimizing the time to detect the unauthorized access and the time to isolate the unauthorized actor from doing harm. A security fabric may make use of some of the other approaches discussed here, such as zero-trust, in addition to other tools such as artificial intelligence to automatically prevent threats.

Intent-based networking

Intent-based networking is a software that helps translate business policies into network configurations. It allows the cybersecurity architect to configure network changes across the infrastructure automatically, and improves awareness of the network state through data ingestion and analysis. This architecture provides granular insight into users, applications, and devices, with the ability to learn and adapt to network changes. It automates security policies across the entire network, troubleshoots performance issues faster, and detects and mitigates threats, including those in encrypted traffic that are difficult to spot.