CHALLENGE
2018 set a worldwide record for net spend by both the private and Federal sector toward cyber security solutions: $101 billion. Federal agencies especially can ill afford an inch of unprotected terrain. They require robust, sophisticated protection from all attack vectors. Yet, few existing solutions provide the comprehensive coverage agencies demand, and even less afford the flexibility to fight an active threat while adjusting an enterprise’s overall cyber posture. Increasingly, agencies are struggling to select, integrate, and manage a unified cyber defense infrastructure.
Federal agencies comprise thousands of devices on located both remote and local networks. While each asset requires rigorous coverage, specific assets (i.e. data servers) require more advanced protection. Each year, customers purchase millions of dollars in networking equipment such as Dell switches, continuing to search for solutions that provide appropriate protection while offering defensive capabilities to respond to a live threat. But with limited solutions available, Federal cyber security experts are forced to weigh the desire for protection against expensive, unsatisfactory products that support for only a fraction of their needs.
Without the expertise to synthesize products from different vendors, it can prove impossible to find the right answer for your agency. Failing to properly integrate, for instance, can expose your agency to increased risk from a threat landscape that evolves daily. The goal of all Federal agencies has long been to aggregate security products into a cyber ecosystem that affords increased protection levels, provides resources required to combat intelligent threats, and enables the enterprise to re-position networked assets during a live attack. Agencies continue to search for an answer that provides security for both physical and virtual workloads while accommodating for the uniqueness of their cloud infrastructure.
At IMPRES, we understand the value of your data and the need to establish a secure network foundation, protecting your data from unwanted cyber advances. Using technologies like Dell/EMC, we’ve spent three years integrating, testing, and delivering a solution that will address your cyber concerns. Our innovative product can be customized and scaled as your needs grow. Leveraging advanced technologies (i.e., machine learning, A.I.) and leading cyber security COTS products, our solution delivers a consolidated network management framework and robust cyber perimeter that affords tighter control for each asset.
SOLUTION
Developed with agencies of all sizes in mind, we present the IMPRES Cyberspace Operations Infrastructure (CSOI). The CSOI offers enterprise-wide cyber protection and security monitoring features, without compromising network integrity or mission-critical operations. CSOI is founded on a Software Defined Network (SDN) and Identity-Defined Networking (IDN) architecture that seamlessly integrates networking and security into a single, unified platform that is topology, protocol and hyper-visor agnostic. The platform is centrally-managed through an intuitive Orchestration Engine that allows administrators to establish ‘one-click’ whitelist policies for simplified deployment and asset management. We’ve made integrating with your existing networking, server, and storage infrastructures like that from Dell/EMC effortless.
CSOI works by combining the capabilities of purpose-built software bundles and COTS products into a fully integrated solution that communicates, protects, defends, and mitigates cyber threats. It provides micro, macro, and cross-boundary segmentation, including end-to-end encryption, and automatically authenticates, authorizes, and connects secure tunnels for data transfer using unique device-based cryptographic identities.
The key to our approach lies in the elimination of IP identifiers from all devices across the network. CSOI incorporates Host Identity Protocol (HIP) as the primary identity exchange mechanism. HIP allows for assets on the network to be separated from identifier and locator roles, replacing these with cryptographic keys that create a zero-trust network environment. Devices on the internal network can only respond to traffic from explicitly white-listed systems or endpoints via encrypted channels.
HIP removes the need for traditional broadcasting between devices, as all routing information between HIT enabled assets occurs within an isolated HIP layer within the network. Any device wishing to communicate within the HIP network must first possess a Host Identity Token (HIT), backed by AES encryption standards. Without a HIT, a device cannot speak to or receive data within the HIP network layer. HIP services and IDN endpoints provide cloaking, secure connectivity, identity-based routing, IP mobility, and micro, macro, and cross-boundary segmentation enforcement, within a military-grade encrypted fabric.
Embedded within CSOI is a unified Management Console which provides system administrators the ability to manage all aspects of SDN, legacy networks, physical, and virtual environments. You can establish security and trust policies for each endpoint, provisioning to-and-from the cloud, while enabling administrators to cloak assets during an attack. Devices can be made invisible to hacker reconnaissance, protected against network and transport layer attacks. Alongside the Management Console is an IDN Conductor, responsible for orchestrating policies across all network endpoints. The Conductor grants administrators the ability to modify communication and Trust Policies between devices without ever changing device configurations. In short, CSOI affords granular control over each networked asset, enabling for heightened or decreased security protection on a per-device basis.
By integrating with an SDN underlay, the CSOI allows for the automatic re-location and re-deployment of assets during an attack, while clearing the network cache within a fraction of a second. When under threat, the CSOI will react by separating, tagging and prioritizing the flow of information across the network. It can detect differences between VoIP, data, and video traffic, re-routing what is most critical onto separate pathways that alleviate bandwidth constraints while ensuring data fidelity. This combination of SDN features with IDN capabilities ensures CSOI eliminates any gaps in your security coverage. We can harden your network perimeter while affording ‘elasticity’ to gauge and react to an existing threat that minimizes disruption while maximizing data security.
Crucially, our CSOI was designed to ensure previous capital investments in your enterprise infrastructure are not wasted. Meaning, you don’t have to ‘rip and replace’ your current network architecture to implement it, significantly reducing both complexity and cost. CSOI is deployed as an overlay, residing either ‘above’ or ‘at the edge’ of an existing network. This enables agencies to customize their CSOI deployment befitting of unique needs and environment constraints. CSOI is delivered in a variety of form factors supporting physical, virtual, cloud, embedded and mobile networks over wired, serial, ethernet, wireless, cellular, and SatCom networks.
Installation can take minutes or hours depending on your physical connectivity. CSOI is production-ready within 60 days of the time of order, fully-customized and ready to install and deploy. We’ve built CSOI to include space for additional COTS ‘spirals’ to be added at your discretion. By adding spirals to your base CSOI, you can ensure your network continuously evolves over time to mitigate emerging cyber threats. And, with role-based access permissions, you can provision control of the CSOI to designated members of your agency with direct integration into your Active Directory infrastructure.
RESULT
By deploying CSOI, you can reduce your attack surface by up to 90%, improving time to mitigation, revocation, and quarantine by up to 25% while decreasing failover and disaster recovery times to as little as one second. Unlike the complex, fragile, and time-consuming steps associated with traditional cyber solutions, our customers eliminate human error through simple point-and-click policy orchestration. All system-level network connections are automatically authenticated and authorized between every endpoint through trusted and verifiable machine identities that cannot be exploited.
With CSOI, securing your enterprise has never been simpler to accomplish. Our solution includes APIs that map and correlate probable threats, ensuring hardware is continuously protected through dynamic, automated policy adjustments. System administrators can now afford to tighten or loosen protection for individual assets, applying appropriate rigor where necessary rather than burdening their enterprise with rigid global policies. When an attack occurs CSOI immediately reacts by providing each affected asset with resources required to vanish and re-position within the virtual environment. With CSOI, Agencies can unlock cloaking features that make asset recognition by a malicious operator nearly impossible.
Our CSOI is built to manage the most complex of network environments, including on-premise, public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. It is the only scalable, multi-use solution that creates a common secure networking architecture able to adapt to any connected resource- anytime and anywhere. Secure internal and remote access for employees becomes much more practical and cost-effective with CSOI. Clients and servers can now connect directly or through HIP switches without the concern of opaque and complex legacy network constraints. With CSOI, you can realize total optimization of your enterprise network.
Our product is vendor-neutral and adaptable to all legacy hardware and software infrastructures. No advanced training is required to operate CSOI, as it was designed with all levels of experience in mind. With CSOI, agencies can achieve fast and scalable network and security operations control, global asset mobility, instant failover, and a dramatic reduction in capital expenditures by reducing if not altogether eliminating security and networking complexity.
Achieving all of this, while keeping things simple and easy to manage for users is what makes the CSOI so unique. No COTS product or existing cyber solution blends the rugged resources required to fight a sophisticated attack with an intuitive interface that lends administrators granular control to respond intelligently. An agency could achieve what CSOI provides by stacking its own blend of COTS solutions together- but at an exponential cost and with a high degree of inherent risk.
We’ve shown you our cards. The CSOI is not just evolutionary in nature- it is revolutionary for the cyber security industry. We offer increased awareness, protection, and resources to defend against the most sophisticated threats, while enhancing the quality of your enterprise network and affording granular control for each endpoint on your network. No other product combines the level of protection the CSOI contains with an automated Orchestration Engine that seamlessly manages and mitigates threats before they permeate your agency.
Our solution is easily adaptable to scale as you grow and can plug into your existing physical or virtual environment, without needing you to re-engineer your infrastructure. It is both affordable and lightening quick to deploy. With CSOI, you can secure every inch of your enterprise and acquire stealth technologies to cloak and re-position your assets unlike any other solution. We are confident the CSOI is the technology that you need to ensure your cyber posture remains vigilant. Let us show you how we can build and deploy a solution that is expertly crafted for your needs.