Digital transformation has significant implications for an enterprise’s attack surface and network and security architectures.
New business initiatives and processes have created new attack surfaces, and a corporate security perimeter no longer makes sense. Applications, users, and devices are moving outside, dissolving what was once the trusted enterprise perimeter. Protection is now needed where applications and data, and users and devices, are.
The old mantra of “inside = trusted” is an antiquated concept as network breaches continue to soar. Companies must evolve to a “never trust, always verify” zero trust model to secure against the wide variety of threats that exist and are constantly evolving.
Enterprise access and security is complex … and changing. Providing secure application access often takes days and requires touching multiple hardware and software components from multiple vendors. And more enterprise apps are SaaS and IaaS, which adds another layer of requirements. Ensuring network security requires specialized knowledge and IT time for reviewing alerts. Multiply this across multiple environments — and often, multiple regions — and the problems magnify quickly. But it doesn’t need to be this complex.
User experience is often a trade-off that comes with having multiple layers of security, or an application delivery platform that doesn’t meet the requirements of a global, distributed user base. This results in unproductive workers, application adoption loss, and extra work for IT with increased help desk tickets. Strong security doesn’t need to come with compromise.
If you opt for a simple VPN setup, you probably do what many companies do — you allow logged-in users to have IP-level access to your entire network. We know how dangerous this is. Why should call center employees have IP access to source code repositories? Or why should a contractor using your billing system have access to the credit card processing terminals? Access should be to just those applications needed in order to perform a role.
What protects your users from becoming unwitting bad actors through malware infections? Prevention and detection of targeted threats such as malware, phishing, ransomware, and command and control are crucial for outbound traffic.
A zero trust security architecture should not come at the expense of simplicity, user productivity, or experience.
As the classic approach to enterprise security is no longer viable, businesses must shift to meet their users, applications, and data where they live — today, that means the cloud, as it offers increased and improved flexibility, collaboration, connectivity, and performance. Akamai has been a cloud-native company since our inception in 1998. Akamai is built on three fundamental pillars that differentiate us from other zero trust solution providers: our unmatched platform, our trusted brand, and our expertise.