A guest blog by Joe Stevens, former Chief Information Security Officer at Criteo.
“Merde happens.”
That is my great forecast for 2023.
“Complexity is the Worst Enemy of Security” —Bruce Schneier
Schneier’s memorable statement came at the end of the 20th century, and since then, complexity and “Merde” have only increased. If security’s worst enemy is complexity, then its most powerful ally is chaos. However, technology and security must live in the real world, with business growth always the priority, making it often difficult to tell the difference between the two.
🤹🏽 com·plex·i·ty: (noun) the state or quality of being complicated or intricate.
💥 cha·os: (noun) complete disorder and sensitivity to small changes.
CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, and other technology leaders live in a constant state of complexity and chaos. And I predict that 2023 will be no different, with security playing an increasingly important role in business outcomes. However, protecting your company’s crown jewels has become ever more difficult against the increasing landscape of threats. At the same time, companies must maintain agility and velocity. Thus, too many organizations are blocked from being able to overcome the complexity and chaos resulting from their organizations, products, and technology stacks.
Tomorrow’s technology and security solutions need to address complexity and chaos, integrating security, agility, and velocity into the very core of businesses. To do this, security needs to become a part of companies’ software development lifecycle (SDLC), where the ins and outs of code can be kept secure.
To make sense of complexity and chaos this year, organizations need to focus primarily on their secure access solutions. Specifically, they need to find solutions that scale and harden zero trust access while supporting agility, velocity, and enhanced security with policy compliance. That’s where BastionZero comes in.
BastionZero is a cloud-native access solution that was built to tackle the chaos of 2023 and beyond. Its unique approach equips your organization to scale remote access securely with:
1. Trustless Security Architecture: Simply stated, multi-root authentication ensures that the user authenticates themselves to multiple independent roots of trust. Rather than authenticating only to their SSO provider (i.e., Okta) as a single root of trust, the user also authenticates to another root of trust. By having the user authenticate to more than one root of trust, BastionZero ensures that the authentication system does not become a single point of compromise. Instead, an adversary would need to compromise multiple roots of trust to compromise the system.
2. Centralized Policy Management: Policy management can feel like a juggling act when IT teams need to keep track of who has access to what systems and targets, when, and for how long. Trustless access requires policies to be centralized, allowing organizations to control access to their targets via a single web console or API endpoint. This makes it possible to enforce the principles of least-privilege access and control exactly which users can assume which roles/accounts on which targets across all clouds and environments.
3. Resilient CI/CD Pipelines: Service accounts are an integral part of many modern workflows, but their complexity and interconnectedness present a unique challenge to IT and security teams. Sophisticated privileges enable them to execute applications with ease—but it is precisely this high-level access that can create potential risks for an organization if not managed correctly. Unlike traditional service accounts, BastionZero Service Accounts provide organizations with a trustless automation capability backed by searchable command logs, session recordings, credential rotation, and instant policy enforcement.
The new year has commenced, yet complexity and chaos continue to affect every aspect of our lives, increasingly demanding our attention. Ensure your organization is prepared to face these challenges by adopting cost-competitive access solutions that protect your business and technology stack.
May the force be with you as you battle the merde.
