What is Enterprise Security Architecture?

The Core Principles

An enterprise security architecture is a strategy for providing comprehensive protection for an organization against cyber threats. The three core principles are consolidation, zero trust, and threat prevention.

#1. Consolidation

According to a survey of 1,200 organizations by Panaseer, the average enterprise has deployed 76 standalone security solutions. Deploying, configuring, and managing all of these solutions consumes significant time and resources, and they generate an overwhelming volume of alerts, impairing security visibility and threat management.

A consolidated security architecture is essential to effectively and scalably managing an organization’s security risk. Security integration enables security visibility and threat management via a centralized, user-friendly interface, eliminating inefficient context switching and improving the performance of the corporate SOC.

#2. Zero Trust

Often, companies take a perimeter-focused approach to security in which insiders are inherently trusted and granted access and permissions that are not required for their role. As a result, the majority of data breaches involve the abuse of privileged accounts.

A zero-trust security strategy tailors the permissions assigned to a user, application, or system to what is necessary for their role. This limits the probability and impact of security incidents by limiting what an attacker can access within an organization’s environment.

An enterprise security architecture makes effective zero trust possible. Company-wide security integration enables consistent enforcement of zero trust access controls across an organization’s environment.

#3. Threat Prevention

Often, corporate security architectures are detection-focused. Once a potential threat has been identified, security tools and personnel take action to block or remediate the intrusion. However, this detection-focused strategy means that the corporate SOC is always reacting to attacks, providing them the opportunity to cause damage or expand their foothold before incident response begins.

Prevention is a strategic approach to threat management. An enterprise security architecture should proactively take steps to block the access vectors used by cyberattackers and identify and block threats before they reach corporate systems. With prevention, an attacker has no opportunity to access or damage corporate systems, minimizing the cost and impact of an attack on the organization.

Benefits of an Enterprise Security Architecture

By deploying an enterprise cyber security architecture with an ELA, an organization can achieve significant benefits, including:

• Lower TCO: An integrated security architecture with an ELA eliminates overlapping and underutilized security tools. Additionally, with an ELA, an organization may have access to competitive pricing and discounts.
• Operational Efficiency: An enterprise security architecture is composed of solutions that are designed to work together to provide the organization with comprehensive protection against threats. By eliminating security gaps and overlapping solutions and simplifying security monitoring and management, an enterprise security architecture increases the efficiency of the corporate security architecture and SOC.
• Interoperability with IT Infrastructure and Existing Integrations: An enterprise cyber security architecture is built out of solutions designed for integration. This enables an organization to integrate solutions with its existing infrastructure.
• Enterprise Security Solution for All Company Sizes: With an ELA, an organization purchases credits that provide access to various security solutions. This enables an organization to tailor its security architecture to its unique needs and budget.