Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you have been following the news or trying to buy gas in Atlanta, you probably have already heard about the ransomware attack on one of the most important strategic pipelines in the US. 2020 saw ransomware attacks skyrocket and now 2021 seems to be following the trend. The current situation begs us to rethink how we think about our security practices and mindset. One area of security that you may have heard about is Zero Trust (ZT).

Barracuda CloudGen Access, the new standard for Zero Trust remote access, and Mattermost, a messaging platform designed for enterprises with high privacy and security needs, have partnered to deliver the most rigorous remote access security for enterprise messaging. In this post we’ll look at how one next-generation investment service firm relies on the CloudGen Access and Mattermost solution to protect customer assets, personal information and corporate intellectual property.

We all like to enjoy untethered freedom, as is shown by the incredible growth of mobile devices we use every day for business and personal activities. We use mobile devices for buying products and services, and banking and investing. We download apps that allow us to connect with our favorite businesses and socially interact with friends and relatives.

The past year has challenged us in unimaginable ways. We kept our distance for the greater good, while companies faced the daunting task of transforming their workforce from in-person to remote — practically overnight. This presented a unique challenge for cybersecurity teams. How would they ensure employees retained access to critical data in a secure way? Working in the cloud has made remote work easier for many organizations, but has also presented new risks.

Are you curious about how Ivanti is tackling Zero Trust? Check out this video clip below and hear from Scott Erickson, Lead Technical Marketing Engineer at Ivanti, to learn more and then visit the Zero Trust Access page for even more resources.

Several years back before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the work-from-home shift took hold, we wrote a blog about how the mobile-centric zero trust framework removed the traditional perimeter security controls to protect the corporate enterprise network and all connected endpoints from cybercriminals.

With the Defense Department’s quick and successful pivot to a remote workforce last Spring via its Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR) environment, it proved that the future to fully operate from anywhere in the world is now. Gone are the days of thousands of civilian employees heading into the Pentagon or other installations everyday. However, with this new disparate workforce comes increased risks for network security. As my colleague Bill Wright expertly noted last Summer.

Zero Trust security. Some would say it’s the latest and greatest buzzword and this disposition is understandable given the amount of jargon introduced into the Information Technology market each year. With vernacular being used interchangeably like “AI,” “Machine Learning,” and “Deep Learning,” these words get stripped of their real significance.

Network security has changed a lot over the years, it had to. From wide open infrastructures to tightly controlled environments, the standard practices of network security have grown more and more sophisticated. This post will take us back in time to look at the journey that a typical network has been on over the past 15+ years. From a wide open, “chewy” network, all the way to zero trust networking. Let’s get started.