Page 30 - FCW, September/October 2021

The Ongoing Quest for Cybersecurity
Verification and validation to enhance zero trust
Kevin Kuhls
Technical Solutions Architect, Forward Networks
validating network behavior are even more telling and help ensure that policies are not inadvertently being circumvented and that there is no unintended connectivity.
It’s impossible for a human being to proactively identify errant configurations within dynamic network environments. Most errors are not caught until there
is a problem. One way to address this issue is by using a digital twin of the network to continually verify and validate the security posture. Regular intent checks can detect misconfigurations and immediately provide operations engineers with actionable alerts to remediate the situation before there is an incident.
Proactive monitoring can also provide evidence of compliance in the event of an audit or identify changes during a specific time that may have caused an issue.
Agencies should also be able
to visualize their zone-to-zone security policy at a glance to ensure that network changes don’t introduce new errors and that connectivity remains as expected. Advanced digital twins exactly replicate the network and can
be used to predict the impact of network changes before they are pushed live so that engineers can execute changes confidently.
In the era of software-defined networking, some security risks are more difficult than ever to detect, and engineers need to be able to query the network in ways
PROTECTING GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS in today’s ever-evolving threat
landscape requires agencies to maintain a deep understanding of their networks and the efficacy of their zero trust architecture. Threats can lurk anywhere, so it’s critical to gather information both quickly and completely about all the endpoints on the network. However, it’s also important for agencies to monitor the system as a whole and understand all possible traffic patterns.
That visibility can uncover risks
that agencies would not have seen otherwise, and it can form the basis of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy
that continually verifies whether agency security policies are performing as expected.
Ensuring security compliance
Networking teams rely on standard configurations to maintain the security policy. These standard configurations dictate connectivity and traffic
flows to ensure users can access appropriate resources while preventing unauthorized access. The idea of a standard configuration seems simple, but maintaining it is extremely difficult.
Validating configurations is clearly mission critical, but monitoring and
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