The Cyber Defense eMagazine February Edition for 2024

One of our customers, a Fortune 100 entertainment and media company, illustrates the
security/productivity dilemma. During lockdown and with most of its developers working remotely, the
company was racing to meet a deadline for the launch of a consumer product.
Remote developers were only able to perform one or two code check-ins involving very large file transfers
a day, compared with four or five for office-based staff. As the risk of missing the project deadline
increased, the company even considered turning off security to improve connection speeds. We were
able to solve the problem before the customer had to take such drastic action. No CISO would wish to
face a similar choice.
Another big challenge for IT in the era of the hybrid workplace is that you don’t just need to secure two
locations but all locations. Work from home is increasingly becoming a misnomer. Users will spend some
time in the office, some at home, some on the road, some in a hotel, a coffee shop, a weekend retreat…
A better term is work from anywhere (WFA), which means you need security (and performance)
everywhere.
The revolution is being driven not just by once-in-a-generation events such as global pandemics, but by
the expectations of a changing workforce. WFA will challenge existing security practices. It no longer
makes sense, for example, to rely on flagging anomalous access patterns when the pattern is constantly
changing.
It used to be that a typical user went home to the same location every day and logged in at about the
same time for email or access to an internal service. If the same user logged in from Cambodia at 2am,
you would block the connection.
Like users, enterprise services are also moving at unprecedented pace, moving out of traditional data
centers to the cloud and to the edge. According to the EMA study, 83% of enterprises are moving
applications edge-ward in the hope of resolving latency issues. Any performance benefits depend on how
they add security into the mix. If traffic is still backhauled to the cloud or the enterprise data center for
inspection, those gains will be lost.
This is another illustration of why the hybrid workplace demands an architectural rethink away from
centralized networking and security architectures and towards cloud- and edge-native architecture. It will
mean a shift from traditional gateway-based approaches to dark networks and automated moving target
defense security (AMTD).
According to Gartner, AMTD is an evolution of MTD, which is based on the basic premise that ‘a moving
target is harder to attack than a stationary one’. It involves the use of strategies for orchestrating
movement or changes in various IT environment components and layers, across the attack surface, to
increase uncertainty and complexity within a target system.”
In a world where the workforce is constantly on the move, AMTD is a more satisfying concept than the
old-fashioned notion of a secure perimeter. While AMTD is an aspiration rather than a reality for most
enterprises, elements of it are already available.
Cyber Defense eMagazine – February 2024 Edition 38
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