Policy Orchestration: Automating Cybersecurity Across Complex Environments

Defining Policy Orchestration

• 📌 Policy orchestration is defined as the deployment of rules to the security stack across all data islands, cloud, SaaS applications, data centers, and mobile devices.
• 🎯 It's designed to manifest an organization's cybersecurity first principle strategies, including zero trust, intrusion kill chain prevention, resilience, and risk forecasting.
• ⚙️ Orchestration itself refers to an automated series of processes to configure, coordinate, and manage computer systems, data, or software.

The Evolution of Security Management

• 🕰️ In the early internet days (late 1990s), security management was simpler with only a few tools like firewalls, IDS, and antivirus.
• Manual changes required logging into each tool individually.
• 🌐 Today's environments are vastly more complex, with systems deployed across multiple data islands, making consistent security management challenging.

The Goal of Policy Orchestration

• 🎯 The primary goal is to create a single place to configure security policies for first principal strategies.
• ⚡ This enables the automatic deployment of prevention and detection controls to every tool in the security stack, across all data islands, efficiently and quickly.
• ⏱️ The aim is to complete the deployment of controls in minutes to hours, rather than days to weeks or never.

Approaches to Policy Orchestration

• 🛠️ Organizations can incorporate policy orchestration into their DevSecOps processes.
• 💻 They might install a commercial orchestration platform or use their own Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tool.
• ☁️ Alternatively, tasks can be outsourced to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) or SSE vendor.

Benefits in Heterogeneous Environments

• 🤝 Security policy automation offers the advantage of standardizing firewall policies across multiple vendors.
• 🖱️ It allows for management through single capabilities, avoiding the need to use multiple GUIs for different vendors.
• 📈 This standardization is a significant benefit for managing firewalls in heterogeneous environments.