Calling the Control Tower: Zero Trust in Your Command and Control Center

TL;DR:  If you’ve decided to implement a control tower to centralize the “command and control” of your applications and resources, zero trust remains an important principle.

In this article you how zero trust is integrated into control tower environments and why it enhances your security posture.

What’s a Control Tower and Why Do I Need it? 

Think of the air traffic controllers sitting in control towers at airports across the world. Their radar screens centralize data on all of the airplanes seeking to enter and exit their airspace. Air traffic controllers have one job: making sure planes enter and exit their airspace safely and securely. 

A control tower in cybersecurity has the same role as an air traffic controller’s radar screen. It centralizes your security management and streamlines your incident response capabilities. 

You might think that only large organizations with large digital footprints require a control tower, but that isn’t necessarily so. There are use cases for control towers in SMBs: 

1. Companies might want centralized control over all of their highly sensitive data - of their own, or belonging to their customers 
2. Regulated industries have strict compliance requirements that make use of a control tower easier to ensure proper governance across all system ‍
3. Control towers can reduce manpower - less human resources are needed when there is comprehensive visibility of all systems in a centralized fashion.

I Have a Control Tower - Do I Need Zero Trust Principles? 

If you have centralized all of your systems in a control tower, you might think that you have a good enough handle on your security posture without implementing any other security measures. 

Not quite. 

The control tower centralizes your systems. But the security measures to “enter and exit” those systems don’t change just because they are now located within your “control tower radar.” 

Zero trust principles, applied within the control tower, establishes a comprehensive and proactive security approach and enhances the security capabilities provided by the control tower:

1. Applies least privilege principles within the control tower, reducing the risk of unauthorized access
2. Mitigates potential threats across all systems within the control tower 
3. Ensures that network segmentation is enforced throughout the network, reducing attack surface area
4. Authenticates users and their devices   
5. Offers a centralized and logged bird’s eye view of threats in all control tower systems 

Ibexlabs’ Approach to Security

Whether you are subject to compliance regulations, or are in a position of high trust with your customers’ data, rigorous cloud security in your control tower is crucial to your reputation - and the success of your company.‍

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How We Work‍

Our process is a straightforward but uncompromising multi-pronged approach. Let’s start with our cloud security framework which applies to your control tower.  Ibexlabs will work with you to make sure that your cloud meets these crucial infrastructural requirements: 

1. Authentication: Multi-factor authentication is the cornerstone of cloud security, requiring two or more forms of identification. We work with you to ensure that this extra layer of security is beyond just a password..  

2. Access Control: Role-based access control (RBAC) and Identity Access Management regulates access to resources based on the roles and responsibilities of individual users. It’s not always easy to identify users and their roles. We will work with you to ensure that roles are clearly defined..

3. User Behavior Analytics: UBA detects anomalous behavior and potential security threats through collection, analysis, and correlation of data from multiple sources, including network traffic, system logs, and user activity logs. We will work with you to build a profile of "normal" user behavior that helps detect deviations.

4. Logging and Reporting: Log and reporting data is stored in a centralized location in your control tower and we will work with you to ensure they are leveraged to identify security incidents and troubleshoot them. 

5. Encryption: As the word implies, we make sure that sensitive data is encrypted - unreadable - without a decryption key, protecting it from unauthorized access whether that data is in transfer or is just sitting in the cloud. 

6. Logical Segmentation: Segmentation involves the separation of your network into smaller, isolated segments to reduce the potential impact of a security breach. We will work with you to design and implement network segmentation strategies that keep certain types of data separated from other data, reducing the surface attack area.

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We partner with global industry leaders like Ermetic, ZScaler, Cloud Storage Security to find security gaps and remediate them as soon as possible, and we have extensive experience of implementing cloud architecture that enables companies to achieve security compliance faster. 

Our Mission 

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We  deliver innovation, deep expertise, and an agile framework to meet our customers’ acute business and technical demands with a holistic approach to enterprise security. And we will stay with you all the way that best practices are deployed regularly to continuously detect, assess, and respond to threats in your control tower environment. 

Contact Ibexlabs today to implement security principles in your control tower. 

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