4 Keys to Managing Security Across Today’s Complex IT Environments

Not so long ago, life was simpler for enterprise security teams. Your organization likely had mostly on-premises infrastructure housing critical apps and data behind the corporate firewall. Your users came into the office each day, connected their company-issued devices to the VPN, and you focused on protecting the perimeter.

How quickly things change! Today’s technology environments have exploded in complexity:

• Hybrid cloud adoption involves a mix of on-prem, multiple public clouds, private clouds, and SaaS apps. End users access resources across edges, which are often inconsistently secured.
  
  
• Remote and hybrid work mean more personal devices are hitting corporate resources from outside the network perimeter, and your attack surface has massively grown.
  
  
• DevOps, IoT, and a tech stack are growing like wildfire—more vendors, protocols, and integration headaches for security teams.
  
  
• Evolving regulations and increasingly punitive fines for non-compliance. All while budget and skills gaps persist.

As an IT or security leader, you face the nightmarish challenge of securing what seems like endless, chaotic environments. Swivel-chair management jumping between consoles no longer cuts it. Teams struggle to keep up with incidents and chase shadows. The key is bringing order to the chaos by focusing on four critical strategies…

Centralize Your Security Management and Analytics

Trying to juggle various disparate security tools across different parts of your business leaves dangerous gaps. Instead, you need to shift towards consolidated analytics, reporting, and policy administration across hybrid infrastructure and clouds.

Seek out security platforms providing unified visibility and control across on-prem, public clouds, private clouds, containers, endpoints and more. For example, a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) approach allows centralized, consistent policy management and compliance automation across distributed environments from a single platform.

If possible, you should construct centralized security dashboards for at-a-glance metrics, alerts and insights aggregated across environments. CSMA platforms excel at this with built-in comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and reporting. This means you can see exactly what is happening at any given time without diving deep into the code or spreadsheets. 

And don’t forget to standardize security policies, compliance controls, and tool integrations through a common management layer rather than taking a fragmented approach. This consistency allows for things like one-click compliance policy mapping and enforcement regardless of workload location.

The benefits? Saving your team time with consistent visibility, faster response times to security incidents, and the ability to enforce and demonstrate compliance across environments.

Adopt a Data-Centric Security Model

Think of your business data as the beating heart that gives your organization life. In today’s threat landscape, adversaries are focused on stealing, corrupting, or holding that precious data for ransom. To keep up, you must put critical data sets at the core of your security program:

• Classify business data by sensitivity level to prioritize security efforts. This allows applying appropriate controls tailored to risk levels based on data types.
  
  
• Implement data security tools that offer discovery, classification, loss prevention, and encryption. CSMA platforms give you centralized data security controls and governance scalable across distributed environments.
  
  
• Monitor access to sensitive data and block suspicious access attempts. Activity monitoring of access requests paired with user behavior analytics spots bad actors.
  
  
• Establish data-level usage policies aligned to risk levels and user roles. Get granular with adaptive access controls based on data sensitivity tags.

You can swap out hardware and apps, but your data persists – and you must vigorously protect it with a data-centric security model.

Secure Your Distributed Workforce

The work-from-home revolution means your remote teams and data may access corporate resources from personal devices and networks you don’t control. This distributed footprint represents a significant security risk if not managed properly. Some keys to securing your remote workforce:

• Adopt zero-trust access principles—Rather than just setting up a hard perimeter around corporate resources, assume that devices and user identities may already be compromised. Verify identity and validate devices for every single access request to company resources and data. Granular micro segmentation, dynamic access controls, and identity/device posture checks should be baked into your zero-trust strategy.
  
  
• Deploy remote browser isolation—One of the biggest threats to corporate security with work-from-home trends is employees browsing risky sites that can lead to malicious payloads coming onto devices or credentials being lifted through phishing. Isolate those risky browsing sessions into cloud browser containers detached from endpoints to contain any threats. This can integrate seamlessly with zero-trust architectures.
  
  
• Enforce multi-factor authentication broadly. Compromised user credentials remain among the top attack vectors. Adding steps to sign-ins, like one-time codes sent to devices, significantly reduces criminals’ access to accounts, even with stolen passwords.
  
  
• Monitor user behavior analytics. Spot suspicious access patterns indicative of credential misuse, insider threats, or attackers’ lateral movement through the environment. Does that admin usually download 50GB of data at 2 a.m.? Are new remote devices popping up to access sensitive data stores? Behavioral analytics can surface hard-to-detect threats based on unusual activity.
  
  
• Provide updated security awareness training – With corporate data now being accessed from the local coffee shop, employee home networks full of smart gadgets, and users letting their guard down outside the office setting, refreshed cyber hygiene remains essential. 

Automate Manual Security Tasks

Modern security teams are constantly overwhelmed trying to keep up with alerts, tool management, reporting tasks, etc. The playbook of throwing more staff at security issues has diminishing returns. Instead, aggressively automate tedious security tasks across your security architecture:

• Security Orchestration & Response: Rather than manual processes to investigate and mitigate security alerts, implement automation playbooks. Modern platforms have built-in playbooks that automatically gather data, determine if an alert is real, and take action like quarantining anomalous behavior. This saves security teams countless hours.
  
  
• Threat Intelligence Feeds: Staying on top of the latest threats is impossible without automation. Enable your firewalls, endpoint detection tools, email security controls, and more to ingest threat intelligence, which automatically feeds so they can block emerging attacks without human interaction.
  
  
• Infrastructure Security Hardening: It’s far too easy for servers, containers, cloud storage buckets, and more to be misconfigured, opening the doors to breach. The problem? Finding these issues relies on manual audits and poking around environments. Rather than doing this repetitively, configure your infrastructure-as-code pipeline to automatically scan for and remediate risky configurations pre-deployment across the infrastructure in development.
  
  
• Compliance Reporting: Maintaining compliance standards like PCI DSS involves mapping controls and producing reports demonstrating compliance – typically a manual effort each year. This diverts security experts away from more valuable efforts. With the right security platform, standards like PCI are automatically mapped to your environment, with reports generated on-demand. Initiatives!

Final Word

Hopefully, these four key strategies—centralizing management, becoming data-centric, securing remote workers, and automating tasks—provide a blueprint to tackle modern security challenges. As your organization’s attack surface continues expanding across complex hybrid IT, it’s no longer feasible to cobble together security. Instead, take a platform approach across environments, put critical data first, enable secure access anywhere, and leverage automation to stay ahead of threats.