By the Greymatter Technology, Innovation, and Outreach Team
Gartner predicts that by 2024, organizations using Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA) will reduce security incident costs by 90%. Greymatter helps customers achieve these savings. It supports CSMA’s analytics, identity fabric, and centralized policy, posture, and playbook management. In this blog, we explain how Greymatter supports the fourth and final layer: the operational dashboard.
Figure 1: CSMA and Greymatter
Why Now
In today’s multi-cloud and hybrid environments many organizations have different security teams responsible for network, cloud, and endpoint security. Each team tends to use its own set of tools which operate independently and do not communicate with each other. And each tool has its own visualization, alerting, and reporting capabilities.
Limited visibility into enterprise security makes it hard to spot inconsistent policies and misconfigurations that weaken defenses. Fragmentation also slows detection and response, as teams must manually collect and analyze data across multiple sources.
The CSMA dashboard layer uses integration and interoperability to create unified views that break down security silos. These views empower teams to proactively detect threats and trends before damage occurs. Serving as a jump point into the security ecosystem, the dashboard layer enables swift and effective response to security events.
Why Greymatter
Greymatter’s intuitive platform enhances the operational dashboard layer. It delivers a single-pane-of-glass view and robust audit capabilities across hybrid and multicloud environments. Teams can more easily collaborate, manage, and maintain a cohesive security posture and coordinate actions. Here are a few top use cases.
Fraud Prevention
In 2022, 70% of financial institutions2 lost more than $500,000 to fraud, with 91% reporting a year-over-year increase since 2021. With losses at record highs, banks must strengthen fraud prevention systems. They need deeper insights into behavior, logins, and activity to detect suspicious actions. Greymatter enables a proactive approach to fraud prevention, enhancing audits without the need for any code instrumentation. Real time monitoring of user activity generates valuable data. This data feeds fraud prevention systems to help detect and block unauthorized access attempts. Efficient collaboration and communication among different teams enables integration and coordination in fraud prevention efforts across the organization.
Threat Monitoring and Detection
The Executive Order on Zero Trust emphasizes real-time threat monitoring and detection as a best practice for all critical industries. This applies not only to government, but also to banking, telecom, and supply chain enterprises handling mission critical operations. However, in multi-theater deployments, early threat detection is difficult due to limited visibility into distributed services and infrastructure. Monitoring intrusions, malware, and insider threats becomes challenging without unified insights across apps, services, and APIs. These issues affect highly regulated, enterprise-scale industries just as much as public sector organizations. Greymatter solves this with a unified view of your application ecosystem and real-time intelligence across access patterns and behaviors. It helps teams spot anomalies, understand context, and respond quickly—regardless of complexity or scale.
Secure Day 2 Operations
As software moves into production, monitoring and managing security becomes more critical—but often harder to see and control. Greymatter provides clear visibility, from service health to memory, CPU usage, and even get/put method activity across the network. This data supports real-time monitoring of logs, security events, and user activity for ongoing threat detection and incident response. It enables continuous security throughout the DevSecOps lifecycle, even after deployment. Developers can stay compliant by automating patch management during CI and CD phases, reducing risk and meeting policy requirements.
How Greymatter Does It
Greymatter is the first application networking playbook with over 100 out-of-the-box automation defaults for security, application, and API insights. As an application networking platform, Greymatter provides robust support for the CSMA operational dashboard layer leveraging Catalog Register and Overwatch capabilities to offer data, insights, and audits of who is doing what, when, where, and how, all available through a Centralized Dashboard. Specifically:
- Greymatter enables consolidation of intricate policy files into a centralized hub and then, with under 10 lines of code, reference that policy for effortless fleet-wide updates across applications, APIs, and data services – regardless of cloud or hybrid infrastructure. Through a Centralized Dashboard, Greymatter provides a holistic view of the entire application networking infrastructure. This includes unparalleled visibility and control across multi-cloud and hybrid environments and is inclusive of applications, services, databases, data stream services, and more. The single-pane-of-glass view enables organizations to quickly assess the health, status, and performance of their network assets. Gaining valuable insights into their operational environment, organizations can make informed decisions, troubleshoot issues more efficiently, and optimize resource allocation for improved operational efficiency.
Greymatter’s Catalog Register
- Network or cloud environments can stay one step ahead with our unrivaled capability to effortlessly integrate immediate forensic user tracking audits with zero configurations needed, ultimately enhancing security and compliance across applications, APIs, and services with ease. We streamline API management with Catalog Register. This enables developers and administrators to easily discover, organize, and document their APIs and services and programmatically integrate with other systems and tools. The robust catalog encompasses all operationally running network assets for visualization in one dashboard, empowering teams to efficiently manage and leverage their resources.
Greymatter’s Overwatch
- Our powerful Overwatch capability offers real-time insights into the activities taking place within the network, including within multi-tenant spaces for separation of concern. Integration with the centralized dashboard provides a unified view and comprehensive understanding of who is involved, what actions are being performed, where they are occurring, when they are happening, and how they are being executed. Customers gain the power to seamlessly view multiple application mesh networks in a unified interface, featuring health status, dependency lists, and comprehensive search capabilities across clouds. Insights include:
- Real-time health heuristics for proactive monitoring and detection of potential performance issues or anomalies to get ahead of potential service disruptions or degradation.
- Application insights, audits, and scorecards to assess the operational performance of applications or services by route or user. These assist in informed process optimization decision-making and help strengthen security within your network.
- Business intelligence and scoring for insights into the business implications of distributed services and data. These are crucial to evaluating cost increases versus reductions, optimize resource consumption, and even make informed decisions about allocating development and engineering time.
Additional capabilities include integration with the other layers of the CSMA framework to ensure smooth information flow and coordination between different security functions. This also includes integration with existing cybersecurity infrastructure, such as SIEMs and SOARs, feeding deep insights that can be leveraged to improve threat detection and response and increase ROI of complementary tool sets.
What’s in it For Our Clients
Our clients gain meaningful value from our early support for CSMA’s operational dashboard layer, including:
- Improved threat detection, response, and real-time analysis with data streams, audits, and insights that enable deeper understanding of the who, what, when, where, and how of activity within the application ecosystem across the entire environment, and fuel faster, comprehensive actions to improve security posture and risk mitigation.
- Centralized management enabled by unified views and powerful auditing capabilities of applications, services, and APIs, empower teams to conduct analysis from the tactical to the strategic level, make more informed decisions, and improve security and business operations.
- Increased collaboration by breaking down silos between teams and tools with access to shared data and visualizations that facilitate communication and coordinated response.
As we continue to address the challenge of team silos resulting from diverse infrastructures and disparate tools, we will further enhance interoperability and seamless communication with other security intelligence systems. Greymatter users can also expect continued cultivation of our intuitive user interface and additional capability to ingest and leverage feedback from various tools to develop proactive deployment strategies for incident response and compliance.
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.
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