By the Greymatter Technology, Innovation, and Outreach Team
The network perimeter no longer exists as organizations embrace multi-cloud and hybrid environments for digital transformation and remote work. Supply chain and geopolitical risks complicate the security landscape. However, large-scale enterprises and organizations in defense and intelligence have operated in this reality for years.
Greymatter.io was founded in 2015. Our customers in the U.S. intelligence community and DoD already had applications and services across multiple clouds and hybrid infrastructures. Some even had servers on the back of Humvees, all needing secure data communication. After 9/11, they began breaking down silos, knowing monoliths were no longer viable. Yet, as they transitioned to net-centric and data-centric operations, new complexities and management issues emerged.
Greymatter’s service mesh technologies, recognized by GigaOm as an industry leader, helped customers simplify management. It also secured internal service-to-service communications. Through a centralized control plane, we handled traffic routing, configuration policies, and load balancing. Our API management and infrastructure intelligence capabilities further enabled teams to manage north-south communications, traffic control, and application networking policies. This advantage allowed us to help our customers securely connect to applications, APIs, services, and data across diverse environments.
Next-level security
In highly regulated environments, service disruptions or data breaches can threaten national security. Protecting data, systems, and infrastructure became harder across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now, with multiple container orchestration platforms and users, applications, services, and data everywhere, the challenge is even greater. Supply chain risks, highlighted by attacks on the Ukraine power grid, WannaCry, NotPetya, and insider threats like Snowden, created new urgency.
Traceability is critical in defense and intelligence. Identity spans individuals and non-person entities, including devices, endpoints, servers, processes, and services. Each entity has its own identity. Validation of person identities and claims to access non-person entities needs authentication, authorization, and auditing. This approach aligns with Zero Trust, which was just emerging when we launched Greymatter. Already entrenched in the community, Greymatter.io had a head start in Zero Trust.
We began bridging person identities to non-person identities, including apps, APIs, and services. This was done before Zero Trust became mainstream and before microservices were discussed. As we’ve matured, we’ve applied micro-segmentation across increasingly distributed environments. This ensures that workload and individual identities flow to allow communication and targeted access, known as least-privileged access.
Today, Greymatter is fully compliant with NIST 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture standards. This enables our customers to comply out-of-the-box. Our Zero Trust compliance, along with our Application Networking Platform, reduces complexity, ensures security, enforces compliance, and optimizes performance in highly regulated, dispersed environments.
Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture is the future
Now, we’re on the cusp of the next evolution in security for modern, ever-expanding infrastructure with Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA), a term coined by Gartner. As cyberattacks continue to evolve and organizations continue to move to hybrid multi-cloud environments, cybersecurity becomes more complex, and organizations need to move away from siloed security approaches that create gaps. According to Gartner, “IT leaders must integrate security tools into a cooperative ecosystem using a composable and scalable cybersecurity mesh architecture.”
CSMA is the future, and it consists of many components with no one vendor providing everything you need. Just as Greymatter supports many of the tenets of Zero Trust, which is an architectural approach and not a product, our platform supports many of the tenets of CSMA today.
In this series of articles, the Greymatter Technology, Innovation, and Outreach (TIO) Team goes into more detail about how Greymatter will play a role in a significant portion of CSMA through specific functionality at the four layers: security intelligence, identity fabric, policy and posture management, and dashboard, as well as through our architecture which enables composability, scalability, and interoperability.
Read the rest of the series!
- How Greymatter enables the Centralized Policy Layer
- How Greymatter enables the Identity Fabric Layer
- How Greymatter enables the Operational Dashboard Layer
- How Greymatter enables the Security Analytics and Intelligence Layer
Gartner predicts that by 2024, organizations adopting CSMA will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%. If you’d like to learn more about how Greymatter can help you start to evolve your security infrastructure to reduce complexity and strengthen defenses sign up for a free 30-Day Security Assessment!
Contact us today to schedule your free consultation, determine your microservices maturity level, and build a reference implementation architecture to begin moving your organization up the microservices maturity model to accelerate software delivery and increase speed to market, while ensuring security.
