Perimeter Security Problems

Cyber Security is poised to be among the most complex and expensive business challenges for the foreseeable future.  Just a few short years ago, tossing a firewall up, performing system patching, and monitoring was considered an appropriate strategy – but times have changed.  Now, network security and IT security in general have evolved into a never ending list of concerns.  So, what happened?

The short answer is the popularity of cloud and mobile technology has destroyed the concept of a ‘walled garden’ approach to IT security.  The existence of perimeter security is predicated on systems & architecture having clearly defined lines of delineation.  Now we have systems that can scale almost indefinitely and can be accessed from literally anywhere, creating a global user-base with a global system footprint.  And worse, once microservice architectures and Internet-of-Things (IoT) solutions become mainstream, the security problem will become extremely difficult, even untenable, using legacy approaches.  It’s time to start thinking about security with a modern view.

Factors that should be considered for a modern security strategy:

• Automate – As much as possible. This will reduce the human effort and human error associated with rapid deployment of systems.
• Immutable – security standards should be defined and universally applied.
• Agile – Security needs to be as agile as your environment. If you are doing CI / CD deployments, or using elastic cloud resources, security needs to right-size autonomously.
• Defense In Depth – Security needs to be integrated at all levels within IT systems, from physical security, and continuing down to the application code level.
• Dynamic – Security is a necessary consideration for all IT systems, but it needs to move as quickly as the business needs change.
• Unified – Solving all security problems with a single ‘silver bullet’ is impossible, but solving layers of challenges should be done in a uniform way.

Taking this approach does not remove the need for traditional security, such as endpoint protection or firewalls, but it does cast a wider aperture to meet the needs of increased accessibility and speed.  SecurePaaS™ is one important element to modernizing system security because it automates the building, deploying, and auditing of security controls for web services and applications.  In a DevSecOps context, SecurePaaS™  maximizes predictability and minimizes down time so organizations can focus on rapidly deploying application innovation, securely.  SecurePaaS™ also scales with demand, ensuring that the security footprint for your applications is always ‘right sized’, ensuring hyper performance without over consuming valuable IT resources.

Enterprises are rethinking deployment with the advent of DevSecOps, and it is time to rethink security deployment  as well.  Through intelligent code introspection, automated security integration, and unified capabilities; SecurePaaS™ is uniquely positioned to meet the application security demands of a cloud / DevSecOps world.