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The federal government continues to make progress towards Zero Trust (ZT) adoption. On May 12, 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14028 to improve the nation’s cybersecurity and protect federal government networks and on January 26, 2022, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a Federal strategy to move the U.S. Government toward a Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity.
Ensuring federal mission sustainment in today’s heavily-remote environment now requires personnel access to enterprise data and assets from nearly anywhere, not just on-prem, but also in the cloud. Security leaders in state and local government and higher education are facing similar issues too. A traditional approach to security based on a strategy rooted in an on-prem environment simply won’t be effective in an environment where your users and data are being accessed outside the purview of your security team and tools.
To address the gaps in security created by this new heavily-remote workforce, agencies are moving towards secure access service edge (SASE), an architecture that combines several different security and networking elements, at one time siloed, for enhanced security in federal enterprises where cloud access and applications are now ubiquitous. Security service edge (SSE), an important concept for understanding the journey to a SASE architecture, represents the evolving security stack needed to successfully achieve a SASE convergence, which includes technology capabilities such as cloud access security broker (CASB), cloud-native Next-Gen Secure Web Gateway (NG SWG), Firewall-as-a-Service, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) that are core requirements for that stack.
If we usefully organize how SSE solves what security must do in this newer world of keeping data safe in the cloud, there are four core principles:
- Principle #1: Security must follow the data
- Principle #2: Security must be able to decode cloud traffic
- Principle #3: Security must be able to understand the context surrounding data access
- Principle #4: Security can’t slow down the network
With these core SSE principles in mind, here are some security challenges that federal, state, and local government security leaders can overcome by leveraging SSE capabilities as part of a data-centric SASE architecture
1. Mitigate user-driven cloud adoption risks with cloud data protection
User-driven adoption has created massive security blind spots. The July 2021 Netskope Cloud and Threat Report noted that cloud app adoption had increased 22% during the first six months of 2021, where the average company with 500–2,000 users now uses 805 distinct apps and cloud services, 97% of which are shadow IT, unmanaged and often freely adopted by business units and users. Netskope is the gold standard for cloud data protection, as acknowledged by multiple industry analysts and evidenced by adoption in the market. We’re pioneering a simple yet powerful approach to modern data protection for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. In contrast to the rigid experience with legacy, appliance-based DLP, Netskope cloud data protection provides the scale, accuracy, and precision needed to deliver security for SASE architectures with agility.
2. Performance and security don’t have to be mutually exclusive
While legacy approaches to security often mean a degradation in performance, modern approaches and tooling can make security and performance mutually inclusive for federal agencies. Netskope boosts business productivity and agility with the fastest user experience and optimized application performance from its NewEdge security private cloud. Netskope’s extensive peering with web, SaaS, and IaaS providers offers fast, low-latency on-ramps to more than 50 global locations equipped with full compute for real-time, inline security traffic processing close to users. Netskope reinforces its cloud security services with industry-leading service level agreements (SLAs) focused on security traffic processing in the cloud.
3. You can’t protect your data if you don’t know where it is
In 2020, 83% of users accessed personal app instances from managed devices each month. Personal app instances pose a data security threat when users upload sensitive data to them: the organization loses control over access to the data, making it more prone to exposure or misuse. Netskope Intelli