Since the onset of the global pandemic, the definition of critical infrastructure has expanded. Critical infrastructure now extends beyond concerns of national security or threats to water and power grids,encompassing attacks on food and material supply chains,energy pipelines, and healthcare facilities.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has identified 16 critical infrastructure sectors whose assets, systems, and networks, whether physical or virtual, are considered vital to national security, public health,and public safety. These sectors range from nuclear reactors and emergency services to healthcare, food, transportation, IT, financial systems, and more.

This broader approach to critical infrastructure implies that organizations must deploy and manage network resilience and cybersecurity solutions from a broader and more comprehensive perspective.Leveraging cloud computing, edge computing, open internet, and other technologies, supply chains are more digitized and diversified than ever before. This expands the attack surface and exposes critical infrastructure to influences from extreme weather events, vulnerabilities, and other factors that could lead to disruptions in other areas.

In today's environment, when it comes to network resilience for critical infrastructure, all organizations should adopt an end-to-end approach, particularly in the 16 industries or related industries identified by CISA.This means focusing on risk reduction, being proactive, and ensuring that organizations can respond effectively to any potential threats and threat scenarios.

End-to-end network security for critical infrastructure can and should encapsulate a range of technologe and service, including secure cloud architecture, disaster recovery, network recovery, data protection,and privacy protection. Here are important features, technologies,and functionalities to consider:

1. Secure Cloud Architecture: The ability to manage all cloud resources from a single unified plane is a crucial step in reducing critical infrastructure risks. Providing an operational center for all clouds ensures a unified cloud security and network strategy throughout the organization, enabling IT teams to identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover in a faster, more confident, and more intelligent way. Using a zero-trust architecture, organizations can verify users, devices, applications, data, and transmission sessions before accessing the network,other users,applications,data,or the cloud.

2. Modern Data Protection and Network Recovery Solutions and Services: Resilience of critical infrastructure is in place to prevent successful attacks and other potential disasters.It also involves having systems and services in place for quick recovery and minimizing damage to data, systems, and applications.

3. Inherent Security of All Supply Chains and Ecosystems: Inherent security begins with supply chain assurance.The organization's manufacturing processes should include multi-layered controls to mitigate any risks that may be introduced into the supply chain. Alternatively, user credential data should be isolated from the operating system and memory. Ensure that servers used provide enhanced security protections, such as preventing BIOS tampering and secure component verification, and use integrated endpoint protection platforms to protect users and devices.

4. Detection, Investigation, and Response Driven by Automation and Intelligence: Unified threat detection and response technologies, as well as secure network solutions like SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), are critical aspects of any modern critical infrastructure network security strategy. Solutions should provide end-to-end visibility and actionable intelligence throughout the ecosystem, with the ability to continuously update threat intelligence to maintain up-to-date protection. With solutions like hosted detection and response, organizations can leverage service-based models to extend disaster recovery security, using real and actionable threat intelligence to monitor, detect, investigate, and respond to threats across the entire IT environment.

Another factor to consider is that as critical infrastructure becomes increasingly vulnerable, organizations in all industries, especially the 16 industries listed by CISA, can reduce risks through network resilience health assessments designed by reputable third parties. This can help business and IT leaders identify vulnerabilities and address specific gaps with tailored recommendations and best practices.

Next Steps: In terms of network resilience for critical infrastructure, the market offers a wide range of end-to-end solution combinations, including the key technologies, services, and solutions mentioned in this article.This includes secure cloud architecture,including zero trust;modern data protection and recovery products and services; inherent security for the entire supply chain; along with highly automated and intelligent detection,investigation,and response solutions.