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Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA)

“CSMA is geared toward simplifying security architecture by encouraging collaboration and integration of a corporate security architecture.”

One of the greatest security challenges that organizations face is security silos. Many companies deploy a range of point security solutions with the goal of addressing specific security risks. As a result, security architectures become complex and difficult to monitor and manage, leading to missed detections and delayed responses.

Cybersecurity Challenges In The Post-COVID World

When the pandemic first struck, governments were quick to implement restrictions — lockdowns leading to a sudden shift to a work-from-home model for most corporates. Although this model allowed business continuity with employees contributing to organizational goals and enterprises, the cybersecurity challenges brought about by it were far too many. Let’s see a few of them: 

Cybersecurity Challenges In The Post-COVID World

Evolving Nature Of Cyberattacks

As cutting-edge work-from-home tools and technologies started getting introduced, the nature of cyberattacks and threats also consequently evolved. Several cases of cyberattacks – from phishing and fraudulent websites to unauthorized access and DDoS attacks – were reported as businesses moved from office-based work models to remote, anywhere work models.

The Growing Security Loopholes With Work From Home

The sudden and widespread shift to the work-from-home model led to the development and deployment of substandard security policies that were inconsistently applied. Since businesses had to immediately transition employees into this new model, not a lot of attention was paid to the security and privacy aspects of the business. 

The main goal was to ensure employees could work comfortably from their homes – and fewer technical controls were put in place. As employees started using personal computing infrastructure to access corporate tools and data, the impact of poorly updated, patched, and protected systems and processes also started being seen.

Aligning Revamped Goals With Security Imperatives

As remote working became a global norm, attackers saw this as an opportunity to step up their game. To safeguard their business from such attacks, organizations were forced to align their revamped goals with new security imperatives – and minimize the exploitation of employees working from home with far lesser supervision and control.

Keeping Up With The Next Wave Of Regulation

With cybercriminals recognizing that data security measures in place weren’t sufficiently robust to prevent them from making successful cyberattacks, organizations were forced to keep up with the next wave of regulatory and compliance requirements established by governments and other authorities.

What Is Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA)

CSMA is a concept developed by Gartner to help companies move past siloed security to a more collaborative and flexible approach to security. CSMA is designed to make security more composable and scalable by modularizing security functions and enabling them to interoperate through a set of supportive layers. By making security more cohesive and collaborative, CSMA enables an organization to achieve better security with fewer resources.

This approach to security is well-suited to the shift towards hybrid, multi-cloud environments where organizations may need to deploy consistent security across diverse, evolving, and expanding IT environments. By defining a framework in which discrete security solutions can work together towards common goals, CSMA enables a more collaborative, flexible, and scalable approach to meeting evolving security needs.

Foundational Layers Of CSMA

CSMA is designed to provide a scalable, interoperable, and composable framework for various security controls and solutions to interoperate more effectively. CSMA’s foundational layers define core security goals and functions that various security solutions can collaborate to achieve.

Foundational Layers Of CSMA
  • Security Analytics and Intelligence Solutions : This layer focus on collecting, aggregating, and analyzing security data from various security tools. Based on this data, solutions such as security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automation and response (SOAR) tools can analyze potential threats and trigger appropriate threat responses.
  • Consolidated Policy and Posture Management : Managing and enforcing consistent security policies across various environments requires translating policies for different environments. Solutions at this level convert policies into the rules and configuration settings needed for a particular environment or tool or can provide dynamic runtime authorization services.
  • Consolidated Dashboards: An array of discrete and disconnected security solutions impedes security operations by forcing context switches between multiple dashboards. This layer provides integrated visibility into an organization’s complete security architecture, enabling more efficient detection, investigation, and response to security incidents.
  • Distributed Identity Fabric : This layer focuses on providing identity and access management services, which are central to a zero trust security policy. Capabilities include decentralized identity management, directory services, identity proofing, entitlement management, and adaptive access.

Benefits Of CSMA

CSMA defines foundational layers that allow security solutions to better work together. This provides a number of security benefits to the organization, including:

  • Intelligent Security Design: CMSA defines foundational layers around core security capabilities. This enables an organization to design a security architecture and deploy solutions based on these foundational laters.
  • Consistent Security: CSMA enables an organization to achieve more consistent security by defining an architecture that allows security to extend as needed. This helps to ensure that an organization can ensure consistent protection of evolving and expanding infrastructure.
  • Flexibility and Scalability: CSMA is designed to extend an organization’s security architectures to include new infrastructure or solutions as needed. This enables corporate security to keep pace with the evolution of expanding, distributed IT infrastructure.
  • Improved Collaboration: CSMA is intended to improve collaboration between an organization’s various security solutions. This improves the speed and effectiveness of threat detection, response, and prevention.
  • Simplified Deployment and Management: CSMA creates an underlying structure for deploying security solutions, making it faster to deploy and configure new solutions. Also, the flexibility and adaptability of the architecture enable it to evolve to meet changing business and security needs.
  • Improved Efficiency: CSMA integrates an organization’s security architecture, eliminating the need for security personnel to operate and context switch between various tools. This enables them to more efficiently deploy, configure and use solutions, freeing up time and resources for other critical security tasks.

Key Points And Goals Of CSMA

  • Promote Identity-Centric Security: Zero trust is an identity-centric security model focused on strong user authentication and authorization. CSMA streamlines zero trust adoption by easing transitions to identity-centric security.
  • Improve Security Integration: Many organizations have a complex array of discrete, disconnected security solutions. CSMA aims to reduce complexity and improve performance by increasing security collaboration and integration.
  • Plan for the Future: Security needs evolve rapidly in response to changing IT infrastructure and security threats. CSMA supports future growth by using plug-in APIs to more easily support extensions, customization, analytics, and support for new regulations and standards.
  • Improve Solution Interoperability: Organizations commonly struggle with interoperability gaps between standalone security solutions from various vendors. CSMA looks to close these gaps by defining a framework for collaboration and cooperation.
  • Simplify Security Design: CSMA defines supportive layers defining enduring, essential security capabilities. This enables organizations to plug in solutions as needed to meet security requirements in a structured way.

Final Thoughts

Older Cybersecurity Models used to build password-protected perimeters to allow devices to gain access to a network, managing access levels internally.

For IT development, the Cybersecurity Mesh approach means a total reconfiguration of the process, integrating different measures during the development process of the network itself. In other words, IT security does not get applied as an afterthought, but is rather created early on in the process when the network’s architectural design is built.

Development teams will be heavily involved in moving security further “to the left” to ensure a more flexible deployment over time.

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