Achieving Zero Trust Excellence: How Greymatter Supports M-21-31

“As the CTO for Greymatter.io, I work closely with our customers and see firsthand how some of the most sophisticated systems struggle to keep on top of cybersecurity. It’s not about throwing more money at the problem, but a framework and mindset to instill precautions throughout the business without reducing productivity.”

In today’s API-driven economy, zero trust is not a luxury but a necessity. Recent high-profile cyberattacks underscore the critical need for robust investigative and remediation capabilities to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The frequency of API security incidents has more than doubled over the past year, with 37% of organizations reporting such incidents in the past 12 months – a significant increase from 17% in the previous year, according to data from Salt Security. Recognizing this, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued Memorandum M-21-31, setting forth comprehensive guidelines for federal agencies to improve their zero trust postures through enhanced logging, centralized log management, and incident response protocols.

At Greymatter, we are committed to empowering federal agencies and our private sector customers to meet these challenges head-on. Our platform aligns seamlessly with the M-21-31 directive, enabling our customers to achieve compliance across Event Logging (EL) maturity levels (EL1-EL3) while strengthening their overall zero trust infrastructure. Here’s how we support these critical efforts:

Centralized Log Management for Actionable Insights

M-21-31 emphasizes centralized access to logging data to facilitate timely and effective responses to cybersecurity incidents. Greymatter simplifies this by emitting user behavioral audit streams into centralized log management systems, consolidating logs from diverse sources into a unified view. This capability ensures federal agencies can meet EL1-EL3 requirements, enabling the detection, investigation, and remediation of cyber threats with precision and efficiency.

Advanced Security Automation and Orchestration

As our customers progress through M-21-31’s maturity model, the need for automated security measures becomes critical. Greymatter offers advanced security orchestration through GitOps-managed playbooks, enabling seamless integration of security workflows. Additionally, it provides automated certificate management with FIPS-compliant encryption, detailed cataloging of TLS versions, cipher suites, ECDH curves, and robust compliance tracking to enhance visibility and control over cryptographic assets. These features ensure a resilient and scalable security posture for organizations navigating complex threat landscapes.

Zero Trust Architecture Support

The M-21-31 directive aligns with the broader federal mandate to adopt zero trust principles, as outlined in EO 14028 and NIST 800-207/207A, emphasizing the importance of least privilege access and secure network operations. Greymatter’s platform simplifies the implementation of zero trust architectures by offering strict access controls, continuous verification mechanisms, and advanced interoperability solutions. Across its enterprise customer base, Greymatter addresses operational challenges such as managing diverse environments, ensuring seamless multi-cloud and edge network interoperability, and adhering to stringent security standards like NIST and DoD directives—even within resource-constrained settings.

At Greymatter, our mission is to make zero trust adoption straightforward and effective. We achieve this through automated policy enforcement, FIPS-compliant encryption, real-time audit streams, and a unified management platform for APIs, services, and applications. These capabilities not only enhance application readiness but also ensure robust security—all while maintaining uninterrupted operations in high-stakes environments.

As a result, our customers are now achieving an 80% reduction in the time required to assess and deploy new capabilities into production environments, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and agility.

User Behavior Analytics for Early Threat Detection

The effectiveness of tools used for security analytics, correlation, and threat detection depends on the quality and depth of data they receive. Greymatter directly supports M-21-31 objectives by delivering robust user behavioral audit streams without the need to touch the existing application’s codebase. By integrating seamlessly with diverse tools, Greymatter enhances visibility into application networking traffic and transactions, generating audit streams that provide critical insights into who is performing what actions, when, where, and how. These audit streams enable customers to conduct detailed network traffic analysis and correlate enhanced data with other collected information to drive actionable threat intelligence.

Aligned with the centralized logging and user behavior monitoring requirements of M-21-31, Greymatter’s advanced network traffic audits allow security teams to efficiently monitor, detect, and investigate potential threats. By analyzing traffic patterns, identifying anomalies, and scrutinizing suspicious behaviors, customers gain comprehensive visibility into network activities. Greymatter’s integration with threat intelligence systems further strengthens these efforts, delivering real-time updates on application networking activity and identity attribution.

Furthermore, Greymatter’s user behavior audit streams offers continuous monitoring of network and user patterns, providing early detection of emerging threats and enabling teams to track malicious activities effectively. These capabilities are essential for agencies striving to meet M-21-31’s standards for enhanced user behavior monitoring, centralized log management, and comprehensive risk mitigation in today’s evolving cybersecurity landscape.

The Path to EL3 Maturity with Greymatter

OMB’s M-21-31 memorandum sets ambitious yet achievable goals for federal agencies, starting with EL1 (basic logging requirements) and progressing to EL3 (advanced logging and security capabilities). With Greymatter’s Zero Trust Networking Platform, agencies can:

• Leverage Greymatter user behavioral audit stream to implement centralized logging and ensure complete visibility across systems.

• Leverage automation to reduce the burden of manual threat response.

• Create dashboards indicating which TLS versions, Cypher Suites, and ECDH curves are being used across the enterprise to detect and mitigate risks proactively.

• Stay compliant with federal cybersecurity mandates while driving operational excellence.

M-21-31 represents a critical step forward in safeguarding federal information systems. Greymatter stands ready to support agencies on this journey, providing the tools and technologies needed to meet and exceed zero trust requirements. Together, we can build a more secure future, one log, one response, and one secure connection at a time.

Ready to learn more? Contact us at connect@greymatter.ioto explore how Greymatter can help you accelerate and achieve your zero trust journey.