What is Defense in Depth?
It all boils down to the diversification of defense strategies. Similar to a diversified retirement savings plan that distributes investments across various assets, an effective defense-in-depth strategy spreads defense mechanisms across seven critical layers. This way, if one layer fails, there are six others that offer a strong, but different, defense.
The seven independent layers are deployed like concentric circles around your most prized core data. Each layer is increasingly strong and uniquely designed to defend against various threats. As a result, just because a threat breaches one layer, it doesn’t give them any special insights that will help them breach another.
As organizations increasingly rely on the cloud to be part of their future-proofing plans, cloud strategy must be considered in-depth in the context of organizations’ defense-in-depth strategy. How does the cloud fit into your defense strategy? Let’s dive into the seven layers of defense themselves:
- Policies, procedures, and awareness
- Physical security
- Perimeter defense
- Internal network security
- Host security
- Application security
- Data security
These seven layers of defense are together supplemented by cloud defense mechanisms to provide a diversified response to the wide variety of challenges that many organizations encounter, like malicious acts by hackers or rogue actors, technology failures, catastrophic events, or well-intentioned but careless users.
Layer 1: Policies Procedures, and Awareness
With great power comes great responsibility. Your employees are indeed your most powerful, valuable asset, but that power holds significant weight. Today, your employees have access to a staggering amount of critical, sensitive information.
