Understand and Protect the Modern Attack Surface

In the modern, hyper-connected and threat-laden enterprise landscape, organizations face increasing pressure to protect their systems and data. Originally conceived in 2010, the zero trust security concept has recently gained new ground and is now seen as a vital element of enterprise information security. It is a model that aids user and device verification, strengthens authentication processes and ensures encryption. However, zero trust is not without its challenges, and mastering the art of zero trust takes strategic management and forethought.

With the rapid rise of web application attacks, which is the number one source of data breaches, securing cloud-based web applications is a challenge. In order to fully protect your web applications in the cloud, it is important to know the risks, select the right security tool, and understand your role in the shared responsibility for security. Securing your AWS workload can mean many different things, ranging from locking down your environment via the AWS best practices list, to completely outsourcing the security management and responsibility to another company. While every company’s security journey is different, everyone can agree that the need to monitor and improve security posture is becoming increasingly important.

Data security is moving to the top of the executive agenda, with companies paying more attention to what data they have, and how to protect it. Organizations are rolling out more access controls and upgrading their monitoring and assessment capabilities to best manage new regulations on the horizon. California’s passing of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CaCPA) on June 28 and adoption of a set of amendments to the law in September has proven to be a strong catalyst for a new focus on data security.

Implementing effective asset discovery and vulnerability assessment are two of the most important first steps in improving IT security. Before you can protect your environment, you need to understand what assets you have across your cloud and on-premises environments, and be able to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities.