Better IT Security Comes with Ease in Overhead for Rural Virginia County

Transcript of a discussion on how a small team of IT administrators at a rural Virginia county government has built a technically advanced security posture that blends the right amounts of automation with flexible administration.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender. 

Dana Gardner: Welcome to the next edition of BriefingsDirect. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator.

Gardner

Managing IT for a rural Virginia county government means doing more with less, even as the types and sophistication of cybersecurity threats grow. For County of Caroline, a small team of IT administrators has built a technically advanced security posture that blends the right amounts of automation with flexible administration.

Here to share their story on improving security in a public sector organization are Bryan Farmer, System Technician at County of Caroline in Bowling Green, Virginia. Welcome, Bryan.

Bryan Farmer: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We are also here with David Sadler, Director of Information Technology for County of Caroline. Welcome, Dave.

David Sadler: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Gardner: Dave, tell us about County of Caroline and your security requirements. What makes security particularly challenging for a public sector organization like yours?

Sadler

Sadler: As everyone knows, small governments in the State of Virginia -- and all across the United States and around the world -- are being targeted by a lot of bad guys. For that reason, we have the responsibility to safeguard the data of the citizens of this county -- and also of the customers and other people that we interact with on a daily basis. It’s a paramount concern for us to maintain the security and integrity of that data so that we have the trust of the people we work with.

Gardner: Do you find that you are under attack more often than you used to be?

Sadler: The headlines of nearly any major newspaper you see, or news broadcasts that you watch, show what happens when the bad guys win and the local governments lose. Ransomware, for example, happens every day. We have seen a major increase in these attacks, or attempted attacks, over the past few years.

Gardner: Bryan, tell us a bit about your IT organization. How many do you have on the frontlines to help combat this increase in threats?

Farmer: You have the pleasure today of speaking with the entire IT staff in our little neck of the woods. It’s just the two of us. For the last several years it was a one-man operation, and they brought me on board a little over a year-and-a-half ago to lend a hand. As the county grew, and as the number of users and data grew, it just became too much for one person to handle.

Gardner: You are supporting how many people and devices with your organization?

Small-town support, high-tech security

Farmer

Farmer: We are mainly a Microsoft Windows environment. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 to 300 users. If you wrap up all of the devices, Internet of Things (IoT) stuff, printers, and things of that nature, it’s 3,000 to 4,000 devices in total.

Sadler: But the number of devices that actually touch our private network is in the neighborhood of around 750.

Farmer: We are a rural area so we don’t have the luxury of having fiber in between all of our locations and sites. So we have to resort to virtual private networks (VPNs) to get traffic back and forth. There are airFiber connections, and we are doing some stuff over the air. We are a mixed batch. There is a little bit of everything here.

Gardner: Just as any business, you have to put your best face forward to your citizens, voters, and taxpayers. They are coming for public services, going online for important information. How large is your county and what sort of applications and services you are providing to your citizens?

Farmer: Our population is 30,000?

Sadler: Probably 28,000 to 30,000 people, yes.

Farmer: A large portion of our county is covered by a U.S. Army training base, it’s a lot of nonliving area, so to speak. The population is condensed into a couple of small areas.

We host a web site and forum. People can look up their taxes, permit prices, and basic information that the average citizen will need.

We host a web site and forum. It’s not as robust as what you would find in a big city or a major metropolitan area, but people can look up their taxes, permit prices, things of that nature; basic information that the average citizen will need such as utility information.

Gardner: With a potential of 30,000 end users -- and just two folks to help protect all of the infrastructure, applications, and data -- automation and easy-to-use management must be super important. Tell us where you were in your security posture before and how you have recently improved on that.

Finding a detection solution

Sadler: Initially when I started here, and I came over from the private sector, we were running one of the big companies that had a huge name but was basically not showing us the right amount of good protection, you could say.

So we switched to a second company, Kaspersky, and immediately we started finding detections of existing malware and different anomalies in the network that had existed for years without protection from Symantec. So we settled on Kaspersky. And anytime you go to an enterprise-level antivirus (AV) endpoint solution, the setup, adjustment, and on-boarding process takes longer than what a lot of people would lead you to believe.

It took us about six months with Kaspersky. I was by myself, so it took me about six months to get everything set up and running like it should, and it performed extremely well. I had a lot of granularity as far as control of firewalls and that type of product.

The granularity is what we like because we have users that have a broad range of needs. We have to be able to address all of those broad ranges under one umbrella.

Many of the different AV endpoint solutions we evaluated lacked the granularity we wanted to address the needs of everyone with one product. We spend six months evaluating and we landed on Bitdefender.

Unfortunately, when the US Department of Homeland Security decided to at first recommend that you not use [Kaspersky] and then later banned that product from use, we were forced to look for a replacement solution, and we evaluated multiple different products.

Again, what we were looking for was granularity because we wanted to be able to address the needs of everyone under the umbrella with one particular product. Many of the different AV endpoint solutions we evaluated lacked that granularity. It was, more or less, another version of the software that we started with. They didn’t give a real high level of protection or did not allow for adjustment.

When we started evaluating a replacement, we were finding things that we could not do with a particular product. We spent probably about six months evaluating different products -- and then we landed on Bitdefender.

Now, coming from the private sector and dealing with a lot of home users, my feelings for Bitdefender were based on the reputation of their consumer-grade product. They had an extremely good reputation in the consumer market. Right off the bat, they had a higher score when we started evaluating. It doesn’t matter how easy a product is to use or adjust if their basic detection level is low, then everything else is a waste of time.

Bitdefender right off the bat has had a reputation for having a high level of detection and protection as well as a low impact on the systems. Being a small, rural county government, we use machines that are unfortunately a little bit older than what would be recommended, five to six years old. We are using some older machines that have lower processing power, so we could not take a product that would kill the performance of the machine and make it unusable.

During our evaluations we found that Bitdefender performed well. It did not have a lot of system overhead and it gave us a high level of protection. What’s really encouraging is when you switch to a different product and you start scaling your network and find threats that had been existing there for years undetected. Now you know at least you are getting something for your money, and that’s what we found with Bitdefender.

Gardner: I have heard that many times. It has to, at the core, be really good at detecting. All the other bells and whistles don’t count if that’s not the case. Once you have established that you are detecting what’s been there, and what’s coming down the wire every day, the administration does become important.

Bryan, what is the administration like? How have you improved in terms of operations? Tell us about the ongoing day-to-day life using Bitdefender.

Managing mission-critical tech 

Farmer: We are Bitdefender GravityZone users. We host everything in the cloud. We don’t have any on-premises Bitdefender machines, servers, or anything like that, and it’s nice. Like Dave said, we have a wide range of users and those users have a wide range of needs, especially with regards to Internet access, web page access, stuff like that.

For example, a police officer or an investigator needs to be able to access web sites that a clerk in the treasurer’s office just doesn’t need to be able to access. To be able to sit at my desk or take my laptop out anywhere that I have an Internet connection and make an adjustment if someone cannot get to somewhere that they need is invaluable. It saves so much time.

We don’t have to travel to different sites. We don’t have to log-in to a server. I can make adjustments from my phone. It’s wonderful to be able to set up these different profiles and to have granular control over what a group of people can do.

We can adjust which programs they can run. We can remove printing from a network. There are so many different ways that we can do it, from anywhere as long as we have a computer and Internet access. Being able to do that is wonderful.

Gardner: Dave, there is nothing more mission-critical than a public safety officer and their technology. And that technology is so important to everybody today, including a police officer, a firefighter, and an emergency medical technician (EMT). Any feedback when it comes to the protection and the performance, particularly in those mission-critical use cases?

Sadler: Bitdefender has allowed us the granularity to be able to adjust so that we don’t interfere with those mission-critical activities that the police officer or the firefighter are trying to perform.

Our security service is hosted in the cloud, and we have found that that is an actual benefit. Bitdefender GravityZone offers us the capability to monitor as well as adjust on machines that never see our network.

So initially there was an adjustment period. Thank goodness everybody was patient during that process and I think now we are finally -- about a year into the process, a little over a year -- and we have gotten stuff set pretty good. The adjustments that we are having to make now are minor. Like Bryan said, we don’t have an on-premises security server here. Our service is hosted in the cloud, and we have found that that is an actual benefit. Before, with having a security server and the software hosted on-premises, there were machines that didn’t touch the network. We are looking at probably 40 to 50 percent of our machines that we would have had to manage and protect [manually] because they never touch our network.

The Bitdefender GravityZone cloud-based security product offers us the capability to be able to monitor for detections, as well as adjust firewalls, etc., on machines that we never touch or never see on our network. It’s been a really nice product for us and we are extremely happy with its performance.

Gardner: Any other metrics of success for a public sector organization like yours with a small support organization? In a public sector environment you have to justify your budget. When you tell the people overseeing your budget why this is a good investment, what do you usually tell them?

Sadler: The benefit we have here is that our bosses are aware of the need to secure the network. We have cooperation from them. Because we are diligent in our evaluation of different products, they pretty much trust our decisions.

Justifying or proving the need for a security product has not been a problem. And again, the day-to-day announcements that you see in the newspaper and on web sites about data breaches or malware infections -- all that makes justifying such a product easier.

Gardner: Any examples come to mind that have demonstrated the way that you like to use these products and these services? Anything come to mind that illustrates why this works well, particularly for your organization?

Stop, evaluate, and reverse infections

Farmer: Going back to the cloud hosting, all a machine has to do is touch the Internet. We have a machine in our office here right now that one of our safety officials had and we received an email notification that something was going on. That machine needed to be disinfected, we needed to take a look at this machine.

The end-user didn’t have to notice it. We didn’t have to wait until it was a huge problem or a ransomware thing or whatever the case may be. We were notified automatically in advance. We were able to contact the user and get to the machine. Thankfully, we don’t think it was anything super-critical, but it could have been.

That automation was fantastic, and not having to react so aggressively, so to speak. So the proactivity that a solution like Bitdefender offers is outstanding.

Gardner: Dave, anything come to mind that illustrates some of the features or functions or qualitative measurements that you like?

Sadler: Yes, with Bitdefender GravityZone, it will sandbox a suspicious activity and watch its actions and then roll back if something bad is going on.

We actually had a situation where a vendor that we use on a regular basis from a large company, well-respected, called in to support a machine that they had in one of our offices. We were immediately notified via email that a ransomware attack was being attempted.

We were notified on our end that a ransomware attack had been stopped, evaluated, and reversed by Bitdefender. Not once, but twice in a row. We were immediately able to contact that office say, "Hey, stop what your are doing."

So this vendor was using a remote desktop application. Somehow the end-user got directed to a bad site, and when it failed the first time on their end, all they could tell was, “Hey, my remote desktop software is not working.” They stopped and tried it again.

We were notified on our end that a ransomware attack had been stopped, evaluated, and reversed by Bitdefender. Not once, but twice in a row. So we were immediately able to contact that office and say, “Hey, stop what you are doing.”

Then we followed up by disconnecting that computer from the network and evaluating them for infection, to make sure that everything had been reversed. Thank goodness, Bitdefender was able to stop that ransomware attack and actually reverse the activity. We were able to get a clean scan and return that computer back to service fairly quickly.

Gardner: How about looking to the future? What would you like to see next? How would you improve your situation, and how could a vendor help you do that?

Meeting government requirements

Sadler: The State of Virginia just passed a huge bill dealing with election security and everybody knows that that’s a huge, hot topic when it comes to security right now. And because most of the localities in Virginia are independent localities, the state passed a bill that allows state Department of Elections and the US Homeland Security Department to step in a little bit more to the local governments and monitor or control the security of the local governments, which in the end is going to be a good thing.

But a lot of the products or solutions that we are now being required to be able to answer about are already answered by the Bitdefender product. For example, automated patch management notification of security issues.

So, Bitdefender right now is already answering a lot of the new requirements. The one thing that I would like to see … from what I understand the cloud-based version of Bitdefender does not allow you to do mobile device management. And that’s going to be required by some of these regulations that are coming down. So it would be really nice if we could have one product that would do the mobile device management as well as the cloud-based security protection for a network.

Gardner: I imagine they hear you loud and clear on that. When it comes to compliance like you are describing from a state down to a county, for example, many times there are reports and audits that are required. Is that something that you feel is supported well? Are you able to rise to that occasion already with what you have installed?

Farmer: Yes, Bitdefender is a big part of us being able to remain compliant. The Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) audit is one we have to go through on a regular basis. Bitdefender helps us address a lot of the requirements of those audits as well as some of the upcoming audits that we haven’t seen yet that are going to be required by this new regulation that was just passed this past year in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

But from the previews that we are getting on the requirements of those newly passed regulations, it does appear that Bitdefender is going to be able to help us address some of those needs, which is good. By far, it’s the capability to be able to answer some of those needs with Bitdefender that is superior to the products that we have been using in the past.

Gardner: Given that many other localities, cities, towns, municipalities, counties are going to be facing similar requirements, particularly around election security, for example, what advice would you give them, now that you have been through this process? What have you learned that you would share with them so that they can perhaps have an easier go at it?

Research reaps benefits in time, costs 

Farmer: I have seen in the past a lot of places that look at the first line item, so to speak, and then make a decision on that. Then when they get down the page a little bit and see some of the other requirements, they end up in situations where they have two, three, or four pieces of software, and a couple of different pieces of hardware, working together to accomplish one goal. Certainly, in our situation, Bitdefender checks a lot of different boxes for us. If we had not taken the time to research everything properly and get into the full breadth of what’s capable, we could have spent a lot more money and created a lot more work and headaches for ourselves.

A lot of people in IT will already know this, but you have to do your homework. You have to see exactly what you need and get a wide-angle view of it and try to choose something that helps do all of those things. Then automate off-site and automate as much as you can to try to use your time wisely and efficiently.

Gardner: Dave, any advice for those listening? What have you learned that you would share with them to help them out?

The breadth of the protection that we are getting from Bitdefender has been a major plus. Find the product that your can put together under one big umbrella so you have one point of adjustment from one single control panel.

Sadler: The breadth of the protection that we are getting from Bitdefender has been a major plus. So again, like Bryan said, find the product that you can put together under one big umbrella -- so that you have one point of adjustment. For example, we are able to adjust firewalls, virus protection, and off-site USB protection -- all this from one single control panel instead of having to manage four or five different control panels for different products.

It’s been a positive move for us, and we look forward to continuing to work with that product and we are watching the new product still under development. We see new features coming out constantly. So if anyone from Bitdefender is listening, keep up the good work. We will hang in there with you and keep working.

But the main thing for IT operators is to evaluate your possibilities, evaluate whatever possible changes you are going to make before you do it. It can be an investment of money and time that goes wasted if you are not sure of the direction you are going in. Use a product that has a good reputation and one that checks off all the boxes like Bitdefender.

Farmer: In a lot of these situations, when you are working with a county government or a school you are not buying something for 30, 60, or 90 days – instead you are buying a year at a time. If you make an uninformed decision, you could be putting yourself in a jam time- and labor-wise for the next year. That stuff has lasting effects. In most counties, we get our budgets and that’s what we have. There are no do-overs on stuff like this. So, it speaks back to making a well-informed decision the first time.

Gardner: Yes, it’s always important to think strategically whenever you can. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how a rural county in Virginia improved its security posture and ability to operate and manage a vast number of operational endpoints with a very small crew.

Please join me in thanking our guests, Bryan Farmer, System Technician at County of Caroline in Bowling Green, Virginia. Thank you so much, Bryan.

Farmer: Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity.

Gardner: And we have also been here with Dave Sadler, Director of Information Technology at the County of Caroline. Thank you so much, Dave.

Sadler: Thank you, sir. We appreciate your time.

Gardner: I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing series of BriefingsDirect use case discussions. A big thank you to our sponsor, Bitdefender, for supporting these presentations.

Lastly, thanks to our audience for joining. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Bitdefender. 

Transcript of a discussion on how a small team of IT administrators at a rural Virginia county government has built a technically advanced security posture that blends the right amounts of automation with flexible administration. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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How Security Designed with the Cloud Migration Process in Mind Improves an Enterprise’s Risk Posture Top to Bottom

A discussion on how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cyber security attack vectors and make their data and processes safer and easier to recover from security incidents.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsors: Unisys and Microsoft.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you are listening to BriefingsDirect. This next data security insights discussion explores how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cybersecurity attack vectors.

Gardner

Stay with us as we examine how those moving to and adapting to cloud deployments can make their data and processes safer and easier to recover from security incidents.

To learn more about taking the right precautions for cloud and distributed data safety, please join me now in welcoming Mark McIntyre, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Solutions Group at Microsoft. Welcome, Mark.

Mark McIntyre: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Gardner: We are also here with Sudhir Mehta, Global Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Unisys. Welcome, Sudhir.

Sudhir Mehta: Hey, Dana, thanks for having me.

Gardner: Mark, what’s changed in how data is being targeted for those using cloud models like Microsoft Azure? How is that different from two or three years ago?

McIntyre

McIntyre: First of all, the good news is that we see more and more organizations around the world, including the US government, but broadly more global, pursuing cloud adoption. I think that’s great. Organizations around the world recognize the business value and I think increasingly the security value.

The challenge I see is one of expectations. Who owns what, as you go to the cloud? And so we need to be crisper and clearer with our partners and customers as to who owns what responsibility in terms of monitoring and managing in a team environment as you transition from a traditional on-premises environments all the way up into a software-as-a-services (SaaS) environment.

Gardner: Sudhir, what’s changed from your perspective at Unisys as to what the cloud adoption era security requirements are?

Mehta: When organizations move data and workloads to the cloud, many of them underestimate the complexities of securing hybrid, on-premises, and cloud ecosystems. A lot of the failures, or what we would call security breaches or intrusions, you can attribute to inadequate security practices, policies, procedures, and misconfiguration errors.

Mehta

As a result, cloud security breach reports have been on the rise. Container technology adds flexibility and speed-to-market, but it is also introducing a lot of vulnerability and complexity.

A lot of customers have legacy, on-premises security methodologies and technologies, which obviously they can no longer use or leverage in the new, dynamic, elastic nature of today’s cloud environments.

Gartner estimates that through 2022 at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customers’ fault. So the net effect is cloud security exposure, the attack surface, is on the rise. The exposure is growing.

Change in cloud worldwide 

Gardner: People, process, and technology all change as organizations move to the cloud. And so security best practices can fall through the cracks. What are you seeing, Mark, in how a comprehensive cloud security approach can be brought to this transition so that cloud retains its largely sterling reputation for security?

McIntyre: I completely agree with what my colleague from Unisys said. Not to crack a joke -- this is a serious topic -- but my colleagues and I meet a lot with both US government and commercial counterparts. And they ask us, “Microsoft, as a large cloud provider, what keeps you awake at night? What are you afraid of?”

It’s always a delicate conversation because we need to tactfully turn it around and say, “Well, you, the customer, you keep us awake at night. When you come into our cloud, we inherit your adversaries. We inherit your vulnerabilities and your configuration challenges.”

We need to be really clear with our customers about the technologies that they need to make themselves more secure. We need to give them awareness into their posture so it's built right into the fabric of the cloud service.

As our customers plan a cloud migration, it will invariably include a variety of resources being left on-premises, in a traditional IT infrastructure. We need to make sure that we help them understand the benefits already built into the cloud, whether they are seeking infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or SaaS. We need to be really clear with our customers -- through our partners, in many cases – about the technologies that they need to make themselves more secure. We need to give them awareness into their posture so that it is built right into the fabric of the cloud service.

Gardner: Sudhir, it sounds as if organizations who haven’t been doing things quite as well as they should on-premises need to be even more mindful of improving on their security posture as they move to the cloud, so that they don’t take their vulnerabilities with them.

From Unisys’s perspective, how should organizations get their housecleaning in order before they move to the cloud?

Don’t bring unsafe baggage to the cloud 

Mehta: We always recommend that customers should absolutely first look at putting their house in order. Security hygiene is extremely important, whether you look at data protection, information protection, or your overall access exposure. That can be from employees working at home or through to vendors or third-parties -- wherever they have access to a lot of your information and data.

First and foremost, make sure you have the appropriate framework established. Then compliance and policy management are extremely important when you move to the cloud and to virtual and containerized frameworks. Today, many companies do their application development in the cloud because it’s a lot more dynamic. We recommend that our customers make sure they have the appropriate policy management, assessments, and compliance checks in place for both on-premises and then for your journey to the cloud.

Learn More About  Cyber Recovery
With Unisys Stealth

The net of it is, if you are appropriately managed when you are on-premises, chances are as you move from hybrid to more of a cloud-native deployment and/or cloud-native services, you are more likely to get it right. If you don’t have it all in place when you are on-premises, you have an uphill battle in making sure you are secured in the cloud.

Gardner: Mark, are there any related issues around identity and authentication as organizations move from on-premises to outside of their firewall into cloud deployment? What should organizations be thinking about specifically around identity and authentication?

Avoid an identity crisis

McIntyre: This is a huge area of focus right now. Even within our own company, at Microsoft, we as employees operate in essentially an identity-driven security model. And so it’s proper that you call this out on this podcast.

The idea that you can monitor and filter all traffic, and that you are going to make meaningful conclusions from that in real time -- while still running your business and pursuing your mission -- is not the best use of your time and your resources. It’s much better to switch to a more modern, identity-based model where you can actually incorporate newer concepts.

Within Microsoft, we have a term called Modern Workplace. It’s a reflection of the fact that government organizations and enterprises around the world are having to anticipate and hopefully provide a collaborative work environment where people can work in a way that reflects their personal preferences around devices and working at home or on the road at a coffee shop or restaurant -- or whatever. The concept of work has changed around enterprise and is definitely forcing this opportunity to look at creating a more modern identity framework.

Zero Trust networking and micro-segmentation initiatives recognize that we know people need to keep working and doing their jobs wherever they are. The idea is to accept the fact that people will always cause some level of risk to the organization.

If you look at some of the initiatives in the US government right now, we hear the term Zero Trust. That includes Zero Trust networking and micro-segmentation. Initiatives like these recognize that we know people need to keep working and doing their jobs wherever they are. The idea is to accept the fact that people will always cause some level of risk to the organization.

We are curious, reasonably smart, well-intentioned people, and we make mistakes, just like anybody else. Let’s create an identity-driven model that allows the organization to get better insight and control over authentications, requests for resources, end-to-end, and throughout a lifecycle.

Gardner: Sudhir, Unisys has been working with a number of public-sector organizations on technologies that support a stronger posture around authentication and other technologies. Tell us about what you have found over the past few years and how that can be applied to these challenges of moving to a cloud like Microsoft Azure.

Mehta: Dana, going back in time, one of the requests we had from the US Department of Defense (DoD) on the networking side, was a concern around access to sensitive information and data. Unisys was requested by the DoD to develop a framework and implement a solution. They were looking at more of a micro-segmentation solution, very similar to what Mark just described.

So, fast forward, since then we have deployed and released a military-grade capability called Unisys Stealth^®, wherein we are able to manage micro-segmentation, what we classify as key-based, encrypted micro-segmentation, that controls access to different hosts or endpoints based on the identity of the user. It permits only authorized users to communicate with approved endpoints and denies unauthorized communications, and so prevents the spread of east-to-west, lateral attacks.

Gardner: Mark, for those in our audience who aren’t that technology savvy, what does micro-segmentation mean? Why has it become an important foundational capability for security across a cloud-use environment?

Need-to-know access 

McIntyre: First of all, I want to call out Unisys’s great work here and their leadership in the last several years. It means a Zero-Trust environment can essentially gauge or control east-to-west behavior or activity in a distributed environment.

For example, in a traditional IT environment, devices are not really well-managed when they are centralized, corporate-issued devices. You can’t take them out of the facility, of course. You don’t authenticate once you are on a network because you are already in a physical campus environment. But it’s different in a modern, collaborative environment. Enterprises are generally ahead on this change, but it’s now coming into government requirements, too.

And so now, you essentially can parse out your subjects and your objects, your subjects trying to access objects. You can spit them out and say, “We are going to create all user accounts with a certain set of parameters.” It amounts to a privileged, need-to-know model. You can enforce strong controls with a set of certain release-privilege rights. And, of course, in an ideal world, you could go a step further and start implementing biometrics [to authenticate] to get off of password dependencies.

Learn How Unisys Stealth Security
Simplifies Zero Trust Networks

But number one, you want to verify the identity. Is this a person? Is this the subject who we think they are? Are they that subject based on a corroborating variety of different attributes, behaviors, and activities? Things like that. And then you can also apply the same controls to a device and say, “Okay, this user is using a certain device. Is this device healthy? Is it built to today’s image? Is it patched, clean, and approved to be used in this environment? And if so, to what level?”

And then you can even go a step further and say, “In this model, now that we can verify the access, should this person be able to use our resources through the public Internet and access certain corporate resources? Should we allow an unmanaged device to have a level of access to confidential documents within the company? Maybe that should only be on a managed device.”

So you can create these flexible authentication scenarios based on what you know about the subjects at hand, about the objects, and about the files that they want to access. It’s a much more flexible, modern way to interact.

Within Azure cloud, Microsoft Azure Active Directory services offer those capabilities – they are just built into the service. So micro-segmentation might sound like a lot of work for your security or identity team, but it’s a great example of a cloud service that runs in the background to help you set up the right rules and then let the service work for you.

Gardner: Sudhir, just to be clear, the Unisys Stealth(cloud) Extended Data Center for Microsoft Azure is a service that you get from the cloud? Or is that something that you would implement on-premises? Are there different models for how you would implement and deploy this?

A stealthy, healthy cloud journey 

Mehta: We have been working with Microsoft over the years on Stealth, and we have a fantastic relationship with Microsoft. If you are a customer going through a cloud journey, we deploy what we call a hybrid Stealth deployment. In other words, we help customers do what we call isolation with the help of communities of interests that we create that are basically groupings of hosts, users, and resources based on like interests.

Then, when there is a request to communicate, you create the appropriate Stealth-encrypted tunnels. If you have a scenario where you are doing the appropriate communication between an on-premises host and a cloud-based host, you do that through a secure, encrypted tunnel.

We have also implemented what we call cloaking. With cloaking, if someone is not authorized to communicate with a certain host or a certain member of a community of interest, you basically do not give a response back. So cloaking is also part of the Stealth implementation.

And in working closely with Microsoft, we have further established an automated capability through a discovery API. So when Microsoft releases new Azure services, we are able to update the overall Stealth protocol and framework with the updated Azure services. For customers who have Azure workloads protected by Stealth, there is no disruption from a productivity standpoint. They can always securely leverage whatever applications they are running on Azure cloud.

For customers leveraging Azure cloud with different workloads, we maintain the appropriate level of secure communications just as they would have in an on-premises deployment.

The net of it is being able to establish the appropriate secure journey for customers, from on-premises to the cloud, the hybrid journey. For customers leveraging Azure cloud with different workloads, we maintain the appropriate level of secure communications just as they would have in an on-premises deployment.

Gardner: Mark, when does this become readily available? What’s the timeline on how these technologies come together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to hybrid security and authentication?

McIntyre: Microsoft is already offering Zero Trust, identity-based security capabilities through our services. We haven’t traditionally named them as such, although we definitely are working along that path right now.

Microsoft Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President Kurt DelBene is on the US Defense Innovation Board and is playing a leadership role in establishing essentially a DoD or US government priority on Zero Trust. In the next several months, we will be putting more clarity around how our partners and customers can better map capabilities that they already own against emerging priorities and requirements like these. So definitely look for that.

In fact, Ignite DC is February 6 and 7, in downtown Washington, DC, and Zero Trust is certainly on the agenda there, so there will be updates at that conference.

But generally speaking, any customer can take the underlying services that we are offering and implement this now. What’s even better, we have companies that are already out there doing this. And we rely greatly on our partners like Unisys to go out and really have those deep architecture conversations with their stakeholders.

Gardner: Sudhir, when people use the combined solution of Microsoft Azure and Stealth for cloud, how can they react to attacks that may get through to prevent damage from spreading?

Contain contagion quickly 

Mehta: Good question! Internally within Unisys’s own IT organization, we have already moved on this cloud journey. Stealth is already securing our Azure cloud deployments and we are 95 percent deployed on Azure in terms of internal Unisys applications. So we like to eat our own dog food.

If there is a situation where there is an incident of compromise, we have a capability called dynamic isolation, where if you are looking at a managed security operations center (SOC) situation, we have empowered the SOC to contain a risk very quickly.

We are able to isolate a user and their device within 10 seconds. If you have a situation where someone turns nefarious, intentionally or coincidentally, we are able to isolate the user and then implement different thresholds of isolation. If a high threshold level is breached across 8 out of 10, that means we completely isolate that user.

Learn More About  Cyber Recovery
With Unisys Stealth

If there is a threshold level of 5 or 6, we may still give the user certain levels of access. So within a certain group they would continue to access or be able to communicate.

Dynamic isolation isolates a user and their device with different levels of thresholds while we have like a managed SOC go through their cycles of trying to identify what really happened as part of what we would call an advanced response. Unisys is the only solution where we can actually isolate a user or the device within the span of seconds. We can do it now within 10 seconds.

McIntyre: Getting back to your question about Microsoft’s plans, I’m very happy to share how we’ve managed Zero Trust. Essentially it relies on Intune for device management and Azure Active Directory for identity. It’s the way that we right now internally manage our own employees.

My access to corporate resources can come via my personal device and work-issued device. I’m very happy with what Unisys already has available and what we have out there. It’s a really strong reference architecture that’s already generally available.

Gardner: Our discussion began with security for the US DoD, among the largest enterprises you could conceive of. But I’m wondering if this is something that goes down market as well, to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are using Azure and/or are moving from an on-premises model.

Do Zero Trust and your services apply to the mom and pop shops, SMBs, and the largest enterprises?

All sizes of businesses

McIntyre: Yes, this is something that would be ideally available for an SMB because they likely do not have large logistical or infrastructure dependencies. They are probably more flexible in how they can implement solutions. It’s a great way to go into the cloud and a great way for them to save money upfront over traditional IT infrastructure. So SMBs should have a really good chance to literally, natively take an idea like this and implement it.

Gardner: Sudhir, anything to offer on that in terms of the technology and how it’s applicable both up and down market?

Mehta: Mark is spot on. Unisys Stealth resonates really well for SMBs and the enterprise. SMBs benefit, as Mark mentioned, in their capability to move quickly. And with Stealth, we have an innovative capability that can discover and visualize your users. Thereafter, you can very quickly and automatically virtualize any network into the communities of interest I mentioned earlier. SMBs can get going within a day or two.

Enterprises can define their journey depending on what you're actually trying trying to migrate or run in the cloud. The opportunities are there for both SMBs and enterprises.

If you’re a large enterprise, you can define your journey -- whether it’s from on-premises to cloud -- depending on what you’re actually trying to migrate or run in the cloud. So I would say absolutely both. And it would also depend on what you’re really looking at managing and deploying, but the opportunities are there for both SMBs and enterprises.

Gardner: As companies large and small are evaluating this and trying to discern their interest, let’s look at some of the benefits. As you pointed out, Sudhir, you’re eating your own dog food at Unisys. And Mark has described how this is also being used internally at Microsoft as well.

Do you have ways that you can look at before and after, measure quantitatively, qualitative, maybe anecdotally, why this has been beneficial? It’s always hard in security to prove something that didn’t happen and why it didn’t happen. But what do you get when you do Stealth well?

Proof is in the protection 

Mehta: There are a couple of things, Dana. So one is there is certainly a reduction in cost. When we deploy for 20,000 Unisys employees, our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) obviously has to be a big supporter of Stealth. His read is from a cost perspective that we have seen significant reductions in costs.

Prior to having Stealth implemented, we had a certain approach as relates to network segmentation. From a network equipment perspective, we’ve seen a reduction of over 70 percent. If you look at server infrastructure, there has been a reduction of more than 50 percent. The maintenance and labor costs have had a reduction north of 60 percent. Ongoing support labor cost has also seen a significant reduction as well. So that’s one lens you could look at.

The other lens that has been interesting is the virtual private network (VPN) exposure. As many of us know, VPNs are perhaps the best breach route for hackers today. When we’ve implemented Stealth internally within Unisys, for a lot of our applications we have done away with the requirement for logging into a VPN application. That has made for easier access to a lot of applications – mainly for folks logging in from home or from a Starbucks. Now when they communicate, it is through an encrypted tunnel and it’s very secure. The VPN exposure completely goes away.

Those are the best two lenses I could give to the value proposition. Obviously there is cost reduction. And the other is the VPN exposure goes away, at least for Unisys that’s what we’ve found with implementing internally.

Gardner: For those using VPNs, should they move to something like Stealth? Does the way in which VPNs add value change when you bring something like Stealth in? How much do you reevaluate your use of VPNs in general?

Mehta: I would be remiss to say you can completely do away with VPNs. If you go back in time and see why VPNs were created, the overall framework was created for secure access for certain applications. Since then, for whatever reasons, VPNs became the only way people communicate from working at home, for example. So the way we look at this is, for applications that are not extremely limited to a few people, you should look at options wherein you don’t necessarily need a VPN. You could therefore look at a solution like Unisys Stealth.

And then if there are certain applications that are extremely sensitive, limited to only a few folks for whatever reason, that’s where potentially you could consider using an application like a VPN.

Gardner: Let’s look to the future. When you put these Zero Trust services into practice, into a hybrid cloud, then ultimately a fully cloud-native environment, what’s the next shoe to fall? Are there some things you gain when you enter into this level of micro-segmentation, by exploiting these newer technologies?

Can this value be extended to the edge, for example? Does it have a role in Internet of things (IoT)? A role in data transfers from organization to organization? What does this put us in a position to do in the future that we couldn’t have done previously?

Machining the future securely 

McIntyre: You hit on two really important points. Obviously devices, IoT devices, for example, and data. So data increasingly -- you see T-shirts out and you see slogans, “Data is the new oil,” and such. From a security point of view there is no question this is becoming the case, when there’s something like 44 to 45 zettabytes of data projected to be out there for the next few years.

You can employ traditional security monitoring practices, for example label-free detection, things like that. But it’s just not going to allow you to work quickly, especially in an environment where we’re already challenged with having enough security workforce. There are not enough people out there, it’s a global talent shortage.

It’s a fantastic opportunity forced on us to rely more on modern authentication frameworks and on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to take on a lot of that lower-level analysis, the log analysis work, out of human hands and have machines free people up for the higher-level work.

We're trying to make sure that as we deliver new services to the marketplace that those are built in a way that you can configure and monitor them like any other device in the company.  We can make sure that it is being monitored in the same way as your traditional infrastructure.

For example, we have a really interesting situation within Microsoft. It goes around the industry as well. We have many organizations go into the cloud, but of course, as we mentioned earlier, it’s still unclear on the roles and responsibilities. We’re also seeing big gaps in use of cloud resources versus security tools built into those resources.

And so we’re really trying to make sure that as we deliver new services to marketplace, for example, IoT, that those are built in a way that you can configure and monitor them like any other device in the company. With Azure, for example, we have IoT Hub. We can literally, as you build an IoT device, make sure that it is being monitored in the same way as your traditional infrastructure monitors.

There should not be a gap there. You can still apply the same types of logical access controls around them. There shouldn’t be any tradeoffs on security for how you do security -- whether it’s IT or IoT.

Gardner: Sudhir, same question, what is use of Stealth in conjunction with cloud activities get you in the future?

Mehta: Tagging on to what Mark said, AI and ML are becoming interesting. We obviously had a very big digital workplace solutions organization. We are a market leader for services, for helpdesk services. We are looking at the introduction of a lot of what you would call as AIOps in automation as it leads to robotic process automation (RPA) and voice assistance.

So one of the things we are observing is, as you go on this AI-ML, there is a larger exposure because you are focusing more around the operationalization in automation or AI-ML and certain areas where you may not be able to manage, for instance, the way you get the training done for your bots.

So that’s where Stealth is a capability we are implementing right now with digital workplace solutions as part of a journey for AIOps automation as an example. The other area we are working very closely with some of other partners, as well as Microsoft, is around application security and hardening in the cloud.

How do you make sure that when you deploy certain applications in the cloud you ensure that it is secure and it is not being breached, or are there intrusions when you try to make changes to your applications?

Those are two areas we are currently working on, the AIOps and MLOps automation and then the application security and hardening in the cloud, working with Microsoft as well.

Gardner: If I want to be as secure as I can, and I know that I’m going to be doing more in the cloud, what should I be doing now in order to make myself in the best position to take advantage of things like micro-segmentation and the technologies behind Stealth and how they apply to a cloud like Azure? How should I get myself ready to take advantage of these things?

Plan ahead to secure success 

McIntyre: First thing is to remember how you plan and roll out your security estate. It should be no different than what you’re doing with your larger IT planning anyway, so it’s all digital transformation. First thing to do is close that gap between security teams. All the teams – business and IT -- should be working together.

Learn How Unisys Stealth Security
Simplifies Zero Trust Networks

We want to make sure that our customers go to the cloud in a secure way, without losing this ability to access their data. We continue to put more effort in very proactive services -- architecture guidance, recommendations, things that can help people get started in the cloud. It’s called Azure Blueprints, a configuration guidance and predefined templates that can help an organization launch a resource in the cloud that’s already compliant against FedRAMP or NIST or ISO or HIPAA standards.

We’ll continue to invest in the technologies that help customers securely deploy technologies or cloud resources from the get-go so that we close those gaps and configuration and close the gaps in reporting and telemetry as well. And we can’t do it without great partners that provide those customized solutions for each sector.

Gardner: Sudhir, last word to you. What’s your advice for people to prepare themselves to be ready to take advantage of things like Stealth?

Mehta: Look at a couple of things. One is focus on trusted identity in terms of who you work with, who you give access to. Even within your organization you obviously need to make sure you establish that trusted identity. And how you do it is you make sure it is simple. Second, look at an overlay network agnostic framework, which is where Stealth can help you. Make sure it is unique. One individual has one identity. Third is make sure it is refutable. So it’s undeniable in terms of how you implement it, and then the fourth is, make sure it’s got the highest level of efficacy, whether it’s related to how you deploy and it’s also the way you architect your solution.

So, the net of it is, a) trust no one, b) assume a breach can occur, and then c) respond really fast to limit damage. If you do these three things, you can get to Zero Trust for your organization.

Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect discussion on how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cybersecurity attack vectors.

And we’ve learned how Unisys helps Microsoft Azure users take the right precautions for better cloud and distributed users’ safety.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Mark McIntyre, Senior Director of Cybersecurity Solutions Group at Microsoft, and Sudhir Mehta, Global Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at Unisys. Thank you so much.

And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect data security insights discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Unisys- and Microsoft-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your community and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsors: Unisys and Microsoft.

A discussion on how cloud deployment planners need to be ever-vigilant for all types of cyber security attack vectors and make their data and processes safer and easier to recover from security incidents. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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