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Safeguarding Enterprises: Mapping Talon to CSMA

By Talon Research | May 26, 2023

Today, many businesses rely on a disjointed collection of independent security solutions and point products to safeguard data and defend against attacks. These disjointed security implementations are inherently complex and costly to deploy, administer, and scale. Even worse, they often leave security gaps and blind spots, opening the door for threat actors.

What is CSMA?

Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CSMA) is a security architecture concept proposed by Gartner in 2021 to overcome the limitations of traditional siloed enterprise security implementations.

The main goal of CSMA is to make cybersecurity less expensive and less complicated. It does this by creating a unified system that makes managing cybersecurity easier and helps different parts of the system work better together.

Although the architecture looks complicated at first glance, it’s actually quite straightforward. Let’s break it down into each of its parts.

On the outside of the diagram, Gartner defines a range of separate security functions, such as network security, data security, endpoint security, web application security, and cloud security along with some components of each broad category. Each line represents an interaction between components. Moving inwards to the center, the architecture also defines four distinct foundational layers that provide common management and administration across all elements. These are:

• Dashboards that provide unified visibility into the entire security ecosystem
• Centralized policy and posture management to ensure consistent security rules across environments
• A distributed identity fabric that provides uniform identity and access management
• A security analytics and intelligence layer that gathers, aggregates, and analyzes data from various security elements

Who should use CSMA?

CSMA is ideal for modern enterprises that leverage cloud services, SaaS solutions, and hybrid workforces. Unlike a traditional perimeter-based security model, CSMA takes an identity-centric approach to security that enables organizations to authenticate and authorize users independently of location or network, in accordance with Zero Trust principles. It provides a common framework for providing secure access for employees, contractors, outsourcers, and third-party vendors whether they are working from inside or outside the enterprise.

Where does Talon’s Enterprise Browser fit in?

The Talon Enterprise Browser is a hardened, standards-based browser with advanced security functionality, specifically designed to protect modern web applications and hybrid workforces. The Talon browser transforms the most common work tool, the web browser, into a comprehensive enterprise security monitoring and policy enforcement point, giving corporate IT and security teams deep visibility and tight control over web services and user actions.

Talon takes an identity-centric approach to security, aligned with the Gartner CSMA model. With Talon’s Enterprise Browser, you can continuously authenticate and authorize users in accordance with Zero Trust principles as part of a distributed identity fabric. You can also tightly control access to applications and resources based on centralized policies. More specifically, you can assess an endpoint’s security posture, and automatically validate the underlying operating system, patch version, installed security software, certificates, etc., before granting access to applications and services. Finally, you can forward Talon alerts and event messages to external systems that provide the centralized dashboard or security analytics services described in the Gartner architecture.

Talon’s Enterprise Browser provides an extensive collection of built-in security capabilities for SaaS and web applications including data loss prevention (DLP) features, threat protection functionality, and granular authentication and authorization controls. It provides many of the network security, data security, endpoint security, web application security, and cloud security functions described in the Gartner CSMA framework—all controlled by a common administrative model that corresponds to Gartner’s foundational layers. An enterprise browser can help you simplify and accelerate your CSMA journey and eliminate cost and complexity by delivering a variety of CSMA functional elements in a single solution.

Talon empowers you to centrally control, monitor, and secure all users, whether they are employees, contractors, vendors, or partners, regardless of the device they use or their location, while accessing any type of web application – all in a scalable, secure, easy to use solution.

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