A distributed enterprise is an organization that has many branches or offices in geographically diverse places. Traditionally, distributed enterprises were mainly large retailers, banks, hospitals, and other large-scale multi-national corporations. However, remote work has been on the rise since the pandemic began, and it has dramatically increased the number of distributed enterprises across multiple industries. As a result, organizations have evolved from having one central office to having multiple office locations. Employees also have the flexibility of working from shared office spaces when there are no nearby local offices or even working from the comfort of their own homes.
Back when distributed enterprises were rare, the main branch or the headquarters of an organization was equipped with all the necessary solutions to ensure the safety of organizational data. As a result, the surface area for attacks was contained within the corporate perimeter. However, with the increase in additional smaller offices in geographically dispersed locations, IT teams are stretched to the limits to provide every remote site with the same level of security.
Employees have been increasingly working from home instead of commuting to physical offices, which has introduced additional complications. On top of this, employees are connecting to organizational networks using the internet connection from their homes and sometimes even from public networks like shared working spaces or a café. And to add to that, employees may use their own unsecured devices to access sensitive organizational data. All these factors have increased the surface area for attacks.
Attackers target the weakest link in any security system to gain access, and the numerous weak devices across remote locations and endpoints provide them with many opportunities.
While distributed enterprises increase the threats to organizational security, there are a few solutions that organizations can deploy to minimize the risk.
A next-generation firewall (NGFW) is, as Gartner defines it, a “deep-packet inspection firewall that moves beyond port/protocol inspection and blocking to add application-level inspection, intrusion prevention, and bringing intelligence from outside the firewall.”
Both NGFWs and traditional firewalls use static and dynamic packet filtering to monitor traffic to and from your network.
However, the significant difference between the two is the ability of NGFWs to filter packets based on applications. NGFWs can use allow lists to differentiate safe applications and malicious applications and can even block malware from entering your network.
NGFWs can deal with newer threats like APTs much better than traditional firewalls, making them a must-have for all organizations, let alone distributed organizations.
Deploying a centralized network security solution lets you view all users, applications, firewalls, and potential threats to your network in one place.
The difference between traditional network security management and centralized network security management is that there are a lot of silos between the various cybersecurity departments in the traditional model. Since all the relevant data is under a single location in the centralized system, it simplifies the administrators’ jobs of keeping an eye on the entire network. It allows them to monitor all devices and keep an eye out for any anomalies. Administrators can now identify issues before they become a large-scale threat and efficiently investigate the cause of any problem that arises.
Zero Trust is a security framework in which no user or device is implicitly trusted, irrespective of its privileges or location. The difference between Zero Trust and the traditional security perimeter is that the latter model considers any entity outside the perimeter untrustworthy, whereas the former considers every connection untrustworthy. Zero Trust allows organizations to implement a single security policy across all users, devices, and networks.
Distributed enterprises are more complex than traditional enterprises with defined perimeters. Securing a distributed enterprise is infinitely more difficult. However, they are here to stay, and security teams have to adapt to the changing security landscape by adopting the latest cybersecurity trends.
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