Cyber Security Solutions

What are Cyber Security Solutions?

Cyber security solutions are technological tools and services that help protect organizations against cyber attacks, which can result in application downtime, theft of sensitive data, damage to reputation, compliance fines, and other adverse consequences.

In the modern security environment, with a wide variety of ever-changing threats, tools are an essential part of cybersecurity. We’ll review several broad categories of cyber security solutions:

Application security solutions—help test software applications for vulnerabilities during development and testing stages, and protect them against attacks when running in production.
Endpoint security—deployed on endpoint devices like servers and employee workstations, prevent threats like malware and unauthorized access and help detect and stop breaches as they happen.
Network security—monitor network traffic, identify potentially malicious traffic, and enable the organization to block, filter, or otherwise mitigate threats.
Internet of things (IoT) security—help gain visibility and apply security controls to the growing network of IoT devices, which are increasingly used for mission-critical applications and store sensitive data, yet are often unsecured by design.
Cloud security—help gain control over complex public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, by detecting security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, and helping to remediate them.

What are Enterprise Security Solutions?

Enterprise security solutions help enterprises enforce security policies across their infrastructure.

What Is Enterprise Security Management?

Enterprise security management (ESM) is the practice of implementing security policies for the purpose of protecting complex ecosystems. ESM encompasses the configuration, deployment, and monitoring of security policies across several environments and security tools.

The goal of ESM is to enable enterprises to gain better control over a distributed and complex enterprise environment. Enterprises can leverage ESM to address unauthorized access concerns, as well as to meet privacy and compliance requirements.

ESM protects both data at rest and data in transit. Enterprises can use ESM to protect information as it passes through various connections, devices, and environments, including personally-owned devices, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure.

Typically, the enterprise leadership team is responsible for leading ESM efforts, including the CISO, CIO, and CSO. Ideally, their ESM efforts should help protect the enterprise against external and internal threats, including internal threats.

What Is Enterprise Security Governance?

An enterprise security governance plan helps organizations define a roadmap that helps fulfill regulatory requirements, control risk, and manage security operations.

Ideally, an enterprise security governance framework aligns business goals and compliance objectives with the mission and vision of the organization.

Enterprise security management is often practiced in accordance with the overall enterprise security governance strategy.

Here are several notable governance frameworks:

Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT) – provides best practices to help align business requirements with technology.
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) – outlines best practices to help enterprises align business requirements with IT services.
International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001– defines requirements for implementing information security management.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – provides several cybersecurity frameworks.

Application Security

Application security processes and tools help organizations discover, fix, and continuously remediate application security threats. To be truly effective, application security should be applied at all levels—including software and hardware.

A router, for example, can help prevent unauthorized traffic from penetrating the network, and a vulnerabilities scanner can help discover and remediate vulnerabilities before a breach occurs. Together, they protect different components of the application.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

WAF is a policies-based filter located in front of a web application and audits the HTTP/S traffic moving between the Internet and the application. A WAF attempts to detect and prevent malicious threats and activities.

API Security

Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable communication between different applications. Since this process lets you transfer information between services and applications, it is highly vulnerable to interceptions. API security solutions help protect APIs and prevent exploitations of transmissions or vulnerabilities.

DDoS Protection

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack attempts to interrupt the normal operations of a single server or an entire network. If the attack is successful, the targeted device, application, or network suffers from an outage or disruption that prevents normal operations. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack typically targets websites. DDoS protection can help prevent disruptions during attacks.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions analyze the open-source components of your application. After the SCA identifies open-source software, the tool provides information about each library, including licensing information and data on detected security vulnerabilities. Enterprise versions of SCA often provide additional capabilities, such as automated policies.

Application Security Testing (SAST/DAST/IAST)

Here are the three main approaches to application security testing:

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)—tools that use white-box testing to inspect static source code and provide reports on security issues. You can leverage SAST to check non-compiled code for syntax and math errors, and to run binary analyzers on compiled code.
Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)—tools that use black-box testing to inspect code in runtime and provide information about potential security vulnerabilities, such as leakage, authentication, data injection, and query strings. You can use DAST to simulate a large number of scenarios.
Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)—tools that leverage both DAST and SAST approaches to discover a wider range of vulnerabilities. IAST tools are deployed in the application server, where they dynamically inspect compiled source code during runtime.
Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP)—tools that leverage IAST, DAST, and SAST, and can detect and prevent a greater range of security threats. RASP tools can analyze user traffic and application traffic during runtime, for example. Once threats are detected, RASP tools can actively respond to the event.

Data Security

Here are key categories of data security tools.

Sensitive Data Management

Sensitive data management solutions help organizations identify and manage various types of sensitive data, including:

Personally identifiable information (PII)
Payment card industry (PCI) data
Protected health information (PHI)
Intellectual property (IP)

Sensitive data management solutions typically integrate with multiple systems, ensuring organizations can manage sensitive information spread across different applications, databases, and user endpoints.

Data Compliance

Data compliance processes help organizations ensure that protected information is properly organized, managed, and handled according to the relevant regulatory requirements. This typically starts with identifying the data type and then implementing the appropriate security and privacy measures. Organizations may use more than one solution to achieve compliance, including tools that automatically identify data types.

Threat Prevention

Threat prevention solutions help organizations detect and prevent known advanced threats and vulnerabilities. This process often involves filtering and distributing relevant data to several tools, which provide further assistance, response, and analysis.

Data Governance

Data governance processes help organizations manage the entire data lifecycle. The goal is to maintain data availability, integrity, and usability. A data governance solution provides capabilities that help organizations define policies and processes, specify data owners, and effectively control and manage data movement.

Cloud Discovery

Cloud discovery tools help organizations identify cloud instances running during a certain point in time. This includes applications, containers, databases, and any other cloud-based component. The goal is to provide organizations with a centralized view of all cloud components, including information about data, storage, and performance. Typically, cloud discovery tools provide auto-discovery capabilities that work across multi-cloud environments.

Endpoint Security

Here are the most common endpoint security solutions.

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP)

EPP tools provide point-in-time protection. Once files enter the network, the APP tool scans it and looks for known threats. Traditional antivirus (AV) solutions, for example, scan files while looking for known signature-based threats.

Endpoint Detection and Remediation (EDR)

EDR solutions provide active protection by proactively and continuously monitoring all files and applications entering a device. EDR solutions provide granular visibility and analysis and detect a range of threats, rather than just signature-based attacks. For example, EDR can detect ransomware, fileless malware, polymorphic attacks, and more.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

XDR solutions provide extended protection and response across multiple layers of security. Typically, XDR involves a stack of tools and capabilities that leverage intelligent analysis and automation when performing threat detection and response. This enables XDR solutions to provide more visibility and collect and correlate a huge amount of threat data.

Cloud Infrastructure Security

Here are popular cloud infrastructure security tools.

Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)

Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solutions are implemented as a security layer running between a cloud provider and the corporate network. The CASB extends visibility and enables organizations to monitor and secure access to their data.

Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP)

A cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) is a solution that helps secure server workloads running in a public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environment. A CWPP helps organizations ensure that workloads remain secure while passing through multiple public cloud environments. The main advantage of CWPP is managing several environments through a single console.

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) is the practice of using several strategies and tools to manage and orchestrate security across cloud services and resources. CSPM solutions provide the tools needed to manage cloud security, including tools for compliance, monitoring, logging, reporting, and incident detection and response. You also gain automation capabilities for a wide range of tasks.

Network Security

Here are major categories of network security tools:

Network access control—enables organizations to control and restrict access to the network. Notable features include denying network access to non-compliant devices, placing devices in quarantined areas, and restricting access to resources.
Network segmentation—enables organizations to control traffic flow. You can, for example, use network segmentation to stop all traffic in one network area from reaching another, and limit the flow of traffic according to source, type, and destination.
Network-Based IDS (NIDS)—solutions designed to monitor an entire network. NIDS tools provide visibility into all traffic that flows through the network. The tool can make determinations according to packet metadata and contents and can detect threats. However, NIDS tools do not provide endpoint-level visibility.
Next-generation firewalls (NGFW)—designed to secure the connections between the network, firewall, and the Internet. NGFW solutions typically use static and dynamic packet filtering, VPN support, whitelists, and signature-based IPS when enforcing security.

Internet of Things (IoT) Security

Here are three important IoT security technologies:

IoT network security—helps you secure network connections between IoT devices and back-end systems. This usually requires antivirus software, antimalware, firewalls, and intrusion detection, and prevention.
IoT encryption—helps you mask data at rest and in transit as it moves between IoT edge devices and back-end systems. This usually requires the use of cryptographic algorithms and managing the encryption key lifecycle.
IoT authentication—helps users securely authenticate and use their IoT devices. This requires managing multiple users per device and providing authentication mechanisms, such as static passwords, multi-factor authentication, and biometrics.

Emerging Cyber Security Solution Trends

DMARC

Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) is an authentication protocol built especially for email communication. The DMARC protocol uses the sender policy framework, (SPF) and DomainKeys identified mail (DKIM) to authenticate email messages.

DMARC adds another layer of trust, supporting the overall security efforts of the organization. You can add DMARC to supplement your security effort but note that it does not provide full coverage.

Passwordless Authentication

Passwordless authentication enables organizations to replace passwords with other forms of authentication, such as password generators, biometric signatures, and tokens. The goal is to reduce the amount of weak passwords created by users and prevent users from using their personal passwords for work purposes. Passwordless authentication can improve both security and user experience.

Zero Trust Cybersecurity

Zero trust is a security model that enforces strict access controls. The goal is to ensure that not only the traditional security perimeter is covered, but also all corporate assets distributed throughout various locations.

A laptop connected to the network, a mobile device connected to the corporate cloud, a SaaS environment shared with external parties—all of these should be treated with zero trust. At the most basic level, this means applying strict authentication across granular user types. Organizations also leverage endpoint security to enforce zero trust.

Privacy-Enhancing Computation

Privacy-enhancing computation can enable organizations to protect private information. A crucial goal here is to provide a trusted environment for processing sensitive data. Additionally, privacy-enhancing technologies typically leverage privacy-aware machine learning (ML) algorithms to decentralize data processing and analytics.

Privacy-enhancing computation often involves the use of homomorphic encryption—a type of cryptography that lets third parties process encrypted data. The third party then returns only encrypted results to the owner of the data, without providing information about the results or data. This process lets collaborators share data without breaching privacy.

Hyper Automation

Hyper automation is the practice of automating as many IT and business processes as possible. This typically involves the use of several decision processes and automation technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic process automation. The goal is to help organizations reduce the overhead and inefficiencies associated with legacy systems by creating efficient, automated, and interconnected pipelines.

Cyber Security Solutions with Imperva

Imperva provides a holistic cybersecurity solution that comprehensively covers application security and data security. Imperva integrates with your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system to enable integration with other cybersecurity solutions covered in this post.

Imperva Application Security Solutions

Imperva provides comprehensive protection for applications, APIs, and microservices:

Web Application Firewall – Prevent attacks with world-class analysis of web traffic to your applications.

Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) – Real-time attack detection and prevention from your application runtime environment goes wherever your applications go. Stop external attacks and injections and reduce your vulnerability backlog.

API Security – Automated API protection ensures your API endpoints are protected as they are published, shielding your applications from exploitation.

Advanced Bot Protection – Prevent business logic attacks from all access points – websites, mobile apps and APIs. Gain seamless visibility and control over bot traffic to stop online fraud through account takeover or competitive price scraping.

DDoS Protection – Block attack traffic at the edge to ensure business continuity with guaranteed uptime and no performance impact. Secure your on premises or cloud-based assets – whether you’re hosted in AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Public Cloud.

Attack Analytics – Ensures complete visibility with machine learning and domain expertise across the application security stack to reveal patterns in the noise and detect application attacks, enabling you to isolate and prevent attack campaigns.

Client-Side Protection – Gain visibility and control over third-party JavaScript code to reduce the risk of supply chain fraud, prevent data breaches, and client-side attacks.

Imperva Data Security Solutions

Imperva protects all cloud-based data stores to ensure compliance and preserve the agility and cost benefits you get from your cloud investments:

Cloud Data Security – Simplify securing your cloud databases to catch up and keep up with DevOps. Imperva’s solution enables cloud-managed services users to rapidly gain visibility and control of cloud data.

Database Security – Imperva delivers analytics, protection and response across your data assets, on-premise and in the cloud – giving you the risk visibility to prevent data breaches and avoid compliance incidents. Integrate with any database to gain instant visibility, implement universal policies, and speed time to value.

Data Risk Analysis – Automate the detection of non-compliant, risky, or malicious data access behavior across all of your databases enterprise-wide to accelerate remediation.

See Additional Guides on Key Cybersecurity Topics

Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of cybersecurity.