Juan Alejandro Aguirre, Director of Engineering Solutions at SonicWall Latin America, tells us companies can achieve secure digital omnipresence.
In today’s digital world, the idea of ubiquitous organizations is gaining more and more relevance due to important technological developments that have eliminated physical barriers in the day-to-day operation of businesses of all sizes and market segments.
Digital technologies allow businesses to operate and be accessible from anywhere in the world, at any time, reaching global markets through emails, online stores or social media.
Cloud adoption allows organizations to remotely store data and run applications accessible from any device with an Internet connection, allowing operations to be not limited to one physical location and can be managed from anywhere in the world. Similarly, the use of mobile devices and digital communication tools, such as email, instant messaging, video conferencing apps or collaborative platforms, enable real-time communication and collaboration between the organization’s users from anywhere in the world; Today, each user is a branch of the company.
For all these reasons, it is stated that currently almost 100% of organizations are ubiquitous. But are they operating their ubiquity safely? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
Traditionally, cybersecurity has focused on creating a barrier or perimeter around all of an organization’s information assets connected to a network in a physical location, operating under the principle that everything inside that perimeter (or network segment) is secure and everything outside of it is potentially dangerous.
With the mobility of users and data, the perimeter loses almost all of its effectiveness, so it is necessary to change the focus and bring cybersecurity controls as close as possible to the data, that is, to users and their devices. This is where the Device-Centric Security Service Edge (SSE) approach becomes a key component for ubiquitous organizations to operate securely. This allows for the following achievements:
Implement digital architectures: An SSE approach makes it easier to manage cybersecurity across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures by focusing on the devices that access those resources, regardless of where the data resides.
Increase security on mobile and remote devices: By focusing on the device, an SSE approach helps ensure that all devices, regardless of their location, are consistently protected. This is important when users access corporate resources from external locations or through insecure networks.
Ensure Zero Trust: A key component of SSE is Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). ZTNA enables access to corporate resources by authenticating not only the user but also the device from which they connect, ensuring that it meets minimum security requirements, and providing as few privileges as possible for the user to operate.
Improve threat detection: Implementing a device-centric SSE model improves monitoring of the behavior of these devices to detect and respond to threats in real-time, mitigating the impact of active attacks executed by modern cybercriminal groups, such as Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) groups.
Reduce the attack surface: By securing each device individually, an SSE approach reduces the organization’s overall attack surface, helping to reduce the risk of cybercriminals exploiting its weaknesses and successfully breaching corporate information assets.
In today’s digital world, organizations are ubiquitous, but they are not exercising their ubiquity securely. To operate securely in this new paradigm, cybersecurity efforts must not only focus on the perimeter, but must bring cybersecurity controls as close as possible to the data, i.e, to devices and users. Therefore, implementing a device-centric Security Service Edge (SSE) model emerges as a high-level alternative to achieve secure digital omnipresence.
