Fight Fire with Fire

14Achieving End-to-End Security

RENEE TARUN

 

Digital innovation brings more opportunities—and increased risk. As the security perimeter expands, billions of security edges are formed; numerous devices that were not accessible in the past are now connected, opening the door to a new wave of sophisticated threats. The complexity of the ecosystem used by even moderately sized companies has become incredibly hard to manage, exacerbated further by the cybersecurity skills gap that has been with us for many years. Sixty-five percent of organizations already said they lacked sufficient resources, even before the 2020 pandemic. On top of this, data and processes are subject to standards and compliance regulations from global, national, regional, local, and industry entities.

Achieving end-to-end security is more challenging than ever because today's perimeter is no longer easily defined. With the explosion of remote working, cloud adoption, and more connected devices than ever, the network perimeter has expanded beyond the traditional data center. The result of all of this is billions of edges that need to be secured. (We covered edge security in Chapter 12.)

At the same time, inspecting network traffic for malicious content has become nearly impossible. According to Google, more than 80% of traffic is now encrypted in transit. The adversaries that generate that malicious traffic are constantly looking for opportunities to exploit any potential weakness in our infrastructures. At ...