One might consider the firewall the most significant invention in cybersecurity in the last 30 years. The firewall has certainly evolved since its inception in 1988 as simple packet filters, launching with stateful filters, then upgrading to its third-generation application layer firewall and more recently upgrading again to the next-generation firewall (NGFW).
While NGFW is certainly part of the cybersecurity stack, NGFW is no longer revolutionizing the way we protect our critical business assets.
Today’s cybersecurity strategies have been disrupted by two new models: the Zero Trust model and DevSecOps.
Zero Trust Model
The Zero Trust network or Zero Trust architecture model was created in 2010 by John Kindervag. This concept completely flips the way we approach cybersecurity. Past models used the concept of a perimeter and whitelisting; however, with the move to the cloud, mobile devices and internet of things (IoT), the perimeter concept is officially dead.
One of the first companies to significantly shift its cybersecurity architecture was Google with the creation of BeyondCorp. The release of BeyondCorp was quickly followed by the Cloud Security Alliance’s creation of a new standard called Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) in 2013.
SDP solves several of the biggest challenges organizations face today, such as patch management, endpoint protection, enforcing multifactor authentication and the principles of “need to know” and “least privilege.”