What is Cybersecurity Mesh?

With so many advantages to the cybersecurity mesh approach, it is clear to see why this strategy is being adopted by more and more organizations. So why should you consider this approach for your organization? First, consider the following statistics:

1. Vulnerability. There has been a 600% increase in phishing schemes over the past couple of years, and ransomware attacks occur every 11 seconds. This exposes the reality that current IT systems are vulnerable. In addition to existing vulnerabilities, there is the threat of a zero-day attack, an attack by a method previously unknown. 2021 broke records for zero-day attacks, with 66 zero days, more than double those in 2020. The cybersecurity mesh approach helps to reduce these vulnerabilities significantly and prepare an organization’s security infrastructure for zero-day attacks. 
2. Cost. The cost of ransomware attacks alone is about $6 trillion annually, and the cost of cybercrime attacks is on the rise at about 15% per year. Digital transformation incurs its own cost, too, especially if an organization’s infrastructure or architecture has to be redesigned. But the reduction in costly attacks and company downtime realized by leveraging cybersecurity mesh far outweighs any initial cost.
   
3. Migration. Meeting the needs of clients and consumers has caused an accelerated shift to cloud computing platforms. However, it can also result in breaches. Cybersecurity mesh enables migration by providing flexible and scalable protection for cloud computing environments.

These factors highlight the need for cybersecurity mesh, but there are other factors that make the cybersecurity mesh option attractive:

1. Ease of implementation. Digitalization has accelerated exponentially in recent years. This rate of growth can render traditional security models top-heavy and cumbersome. Cybersecurity mesh is uniquely suited to make design, deployment, and maintenance simple and efficient.
2. Practicality. Cloud-based applications, distributed data, and uncontrolled devices all complicate traditional security policies and techniques. Therefore, a cybersecurity mesh strategy is a more practical model for dealing with components of an organization’s digital assets that lie outside the traditional network perimeter.
   
3. Agility. The nature of the cybersecurity mesh approach is that it makes an organization’s response to security and expansion more agile. Nodes can be added or removed with relative ease, new locations can be monitored and controlled from a central control point, and threat response and mitigation can more easily mitigate an attack.

The acceleration of digital transformation and innovation has caused a whirlwind of evolution in the cyber needs of organizations of various sizes. Keeping up with existing threats and preparing for zero-day threats has become more complex and challenging. As a result, an organization must unify its protection tools so they cover all access and endpoints. With cybersecurity mesh, security policies can be applied to all segments of your environment.

Firewalls and network control tools ensure that a particular area is independently safe and not a threat to the rest of the infrastructure. Cybersecurity controls can be delivered and managed through the cloud from a single control point. By centralizing controls in this way, an organization can reduce their IT staff expenditure, including the workstations they would need to manage disparate solutions. Additionally, you can use one control center—managed by a single individual or small team.