As companies undergo digital transformation and create hybrid workplaces, they generate more risk by extending beyond the traditional network. Adopting new technologies expands the attack surface, giving cyber criminals more opportunities to stage a breach.
To combat increased risk, today’s companies use many point solutions for security that need to communicate and share threat intelligence. However, these point solutions often lack the integration required to create a cohesive defense strategy.
By integrating point solutions, cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) enables this communication while simplifying management, providing threat intelligence, and using AI-driven automation for self-healing.
With CSMA, companies benefit from network and endpoint security that leverages real-time threat intelligence.
Network Security
Gartner proposed cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) as an approach to network security infrastructure that supports interoperability between separate security products, enabling companies to take on a more consolidated security posture. CSMA gives broad visibility and protection across the entire attack surface.
CSMA provides the opportunity to take security infrastructure to the next level by integrating it with your network. With CSMA, tools protect all communications being transmitted back and forth, making the network safer.
CSMA also enables companies to take an agile approach to network security. An organization can add or remove nodes easily as needed. New locations can be monitored and controlled from a central point.
Fortinet Security Fabric has Secure Networking as one of its pillars. Secure Networking tightly integrates network infrastructure with advanced security across the network to the edge to provide consistent policies and a better user experience for the hybrid workforce.
Endpoint Security
As organizations expand beyond their in-office environments to include more endpoints, such as connected devices and the devices used by remote workers, each endpoint becomes a potential entry point for a hacker. These companies need a way to protect endpoints that are located beyond the perimeter at the edge of the network.
CSMA extends security across an organization’s entire architecture, making it possible to secure all systems and access points with a single, unified set of technologies.
Fortinet Security Fabric provides user and device security to protect endpoints. Both signature-based and behavior-based endpoint protections give companies the ability to remediate the effects of an attack. Zero-trust controls are used to identify, authenticate, and grant users access to networks and applications.
Cyber Threat Intelligence
With CSMA, centralized management allows huge volumes of data to be collected from multiple tools, consolidated, and analyzed in real time at a central location. This centralized management improves risk analysis capabilities, accelerates threat response time, and supports the mitigation of attacks. CSMA is driven by the most recent threat intelligence, so it can evolve as new threats emerge.
All FortiGuard security services are natively integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric, enabling rapid, coordinated detection and enforcement across the entire attack surface. Security Fabric continually assesses risk and automatically adjusts to defend against the latest known and unknown threats in real time.
Fortinet Security Fabric uses proven machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models, which are informed by unified data sets feeding from networks, endpoints, clouds, rich independent research, and comprehensive industry collaboration.
Real-time intelligence empowers companies to break the attack sequence by rapidly adjusting their security posture to defend against emerging threats across expanding attack surfaces. Using AI-powered automation for self-healing, CSMA enables devices to detect anomalies and adjust to the threat without human intervention.
How to Adopt Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture
If your company is using a traditional network currently, moving to CSMA can require a lot of adjustments to your infrastructure. To implement CSMA, you need to identify your attack surfaces and then use a unified, centralized, and multi-faceted system to protect all your digital assets.
However, the benefits you will gain are worth the effort.
Fortinet Security Fabric is the industry’s highest-performing cybersecurity mesh platform. Security Fabric spans the extended digital attack surface by converging network security to provide comprehensive real-time cybersecurity protection from users to applications.
ProActive Solutions partners with Fortinet to provide our customers with leading security technology solutions and expertise. We take a consultative approach to security, working with your company to update your approach to security with strategies that include new architectures, such as cybersecurity mesh.
Learn more about making the transition to cybersecurity mesh architecture. Request a consultation from ProActive.
