Why I maintain that ZT must start at the network front door is because the growing vulnerability is operational systems, e.g. manufacturing, followed by energy utilities as leading the number of attacks. Why? It is clear that national stability is a priority objective.
However focusing on business data is a good thing. Because the way that threat actors are initially accessing an organization's systems and data is still through phishing, as this interesting from IBM shows:
So while I think that focusing on business applications is a somewhat wasted effort, if the front door (identity access to the network) is not locked, defended, logged, and monitored with real-time detection and prevention, it is clear that business data is a key vulnerability. So I highly recommend a dual effort of security architecture and design and development to identify and secure every network hop, as well as classifying, identifying and encrypting all access to business data. Because these two aspects are the major incursion vectors. Getting in through business data insecurity, then taking advantage of unsecured external and internal networking, particularly remote access from workers and third parties. Nothing new there then.
As a senior cybersecurity architect, IMHO it is time to act on the requirements of both IOT and business applications - improve identity management over the public internet, ensure the network data plane is governed by the control plane from end-to-end, and data guard all business access to information that is in any way sensitive.
Best Regards
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Nya Murray
Director
Trac-Car
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