According to Gartner, the Hype Cycle for Security Operations saw the retirement of one innovation, cloud access security broker (CASB). It has been ultimately consolidated into the security services edge (SSE) primarily due to its integration with secure web gateways (SWG) and zero trust network architectures (ZTNA), which are part of SSE.

A technology on the rise however, is Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture which can be transformational for architecting secure, centralized security operations and oversight that emphasizes composable, independent security monitoring, predictive analytics and proactive enforcement, centralized intelligence and governance, and a common identity fabric.

The objective is to simplify the growing complexity of managing security tools, intelligence and identity solutions. Organizations must begin evolving toward a radically more flexible security architecture to prevent the impact of fast-emerging, evolving and retiring security tool categories and attack types.

The technology is a potential solution to problems currently suffered by defense-in-depth security architectures that most organizations employ. These are often made up of multiple point solutions that are poorly interconnected. It addresses many challenges, including centralized exposure and security posture management, threat awareness, coordinated detection methodology and use cases, harmonized threat reporting and proactive response, and an increase in the efficiency of cross-tool collaboration.

Why Important Now?

Organizations increasingly require a broader perspective on the impact and likelihood of a threat or an exposure to a threat; it is this detail that is crucial in making better security decisions.

IT security organizations can be overwhelmed when trying to stay ahead of new and more complex attacks, and when deploying the latest security tools to ever-expanding infrastructure. Teams are not able to implement the analytical capability required to be proactive and dynamic regarding their security enforcement and response decisions, and these decisions are rarely fast enough to meet business needs.

Effective security and identity management requires a layered and collaborative approach, but today’s solutions are instead siloes that operate with insufficient knowledge of other tools and leave gaps. These silos are time-consuming to operate and monitor.

Organizations understand and acknowledge the skills gaps and challenges in volumes of work, but do not have clear solutions to deal with these issues.

Organizations are frustrated by the lack of integration and consistent visibility within their current security workbenches. Security and risk management leaders require an architecture that not only reacts to the current security issues (those that are visible in the organization), but provides a coordinated and holistic approach to complex security problems.

Creating a collaborative ecosystem of security tools will address inconsistency and help understand and minimize the exposure that is consistent with business expectations.

Obstacles to Overcome.

As the category emerges and becomes less embryonic, vendors add support for the architecture principles to their products, and vendor lock-in will likely be a concern. If a proprietary approach is employed, it may serve to block, rather than facilitate, cross-tool integration; then gaps in coverage will likely appear, and this inflexibility will drive up cost.

Those organizations that choose to create their own architectural construct will likely need significant engineering effort to integrate disparate products and may suffer if the security industry moves toward a set of standards for interoperability after significant custom integration work has been completed.

Currently, there are no vendors that offer what might be described as an enterprise solution. Features and requirements of the reference architecture continue to evolve in response to consumer IT advancement and security technology consolidation as a result of vendor acquisitions and partnerships.

Preparation is Critical.

To prepare for the inevitable emergence of a market leader, organizations should select point product vendors that are aligning to the CSMA reference architecture, have fully developed advanced APIs, complete adherence to modern security standards and have integrations into security partner networks.

Evolve your identity infrastructure to an identity fabric by removing silos to achieve dynamic real-time identity capabilities that incorporate a more complete set of context and risk signals (such as device proximity, posture, biometrics and location).

This technology will be transformational and early adopters will reap immediate benefits in the face of an onslaught of threat vectors powered by GAI.