The decade’s security buzzword – zero-trust – has seen significant investments, but intended benefits elude more than six. This is partly due to a dynamic threat landscape and haphazard zero-trust implementation that is too static to evolve with ground realities. Technologies that strengthen security also enable sophisticated cyberattacks. Generative AI (GenAI) has caused a 1200% rise in phishing since 2022, and attackers are expected to maintain an edge over defenders for at least two years. Quantum computing could let adversaries decrypt stolen data, while supply chain attacks and exploitable code bugs add to security challenges. With a cyber-attack occurring every 39 seconds, zero-trust architectures prove ineffective because they are built to defend against known unknowns. They fail when confronted with attacks such as zero-day exploits that enterprises are completely oblivious to. The risk of letting attackers remain undetected in a network only amplifies the damage, requiring drastic reduction in time to detect and mitigate.

The need of the hour is to make cybersecurity policies reflective of the constantly changing threat landscape. In other words, joining forces with a cyber fusion center (CFC).

After a recent acquisition, a leading bank struggled with limited visibility across acquired infrastructure components and user identities, overwhelming its security teams with a high rate of false positives from disparate security tools. The bank implemented a CFC alongside zero-trust principles that integrated the tool landscape, simplified identity and user management, while automating more than 50 security functions, leading to approximately 65% of incident responses being automated. Directory sync enabled effective User and Entity Behavior Analytics, while automated metrics enhanced performance and compliance. This streamlined operations, reduced manual intervention and improved visibility, strengthening the bank’s cyber resilience and accelerated threat response.

Elevating Zero-Trust for Zero-Day Exploits

By constantly collecting information on the cyber estate, within and outside of the enterprise, cyber fusion centers enable zero-trust strategies to stay on top of evolving threats.

As a centralized hub that brings together threat intelligence, incident response, security operations and risk management, cyber fusion centers facilitate collaboration and information sharing. This enables enterprises to break down silos, enhance situational awareness and accelerate decision-making, ultimately improving the overall cyber resilience.

Here is how cyber fusion centers and zero-trust work better to secure an enterprise against evolving threats:

• Single-pane view of cyber landscape: Cyber fusion centers offer security teams end-to-end visibility across all relevant cybersecurity information, including granular logs and telemetry. Instead of toggling between tools or interfaces, security teams can monitor threats, vulnerabilities, incidents and network activity through a single, integrated interface. This holistic visibility enables faster identification and response to potential threats, supports better decision-making and streamlines collaboration across teams. With a single pane view that breaks down information silos, cyber fusion centers help security teams to keep access policies up to date, enhancing overall cyber resilience.
• Data correlation to classify even weak signals: Using advanced analytics and automation to sift through vast amounts of security data, such as network activity logs, vulnerability reports and incident alerts, helps security teams spot subtle indicators of compromise or suspicious behavior to arrest an intrusion before it creates an impact. By correlating data points from different systems and teams, security professionals can detect weak signals or minor irregularities and isolated events that, on their own, may not seem significant. However, when these weak signals are classified and linked together, they reveal underlying threats or emerging attack patterns. This approach helps enterprises to proactively respond to potential risks before they escalate, improving overall cyber resilience and reducing the time attackers remain undetected within the network. Teams can use intelligence gathered from such analysis to update access policies or restrict movement within a network to augment a zero-trust architecture.
• Automated and orchestrated response: To further strengthen the zero-trust framework, automation and orchestration capabilities offered by cyber fusion centers enable security to act proactively to secure the cyber estate. Enabling a seamless coordination of people, processes and technologies, automation can trigger predefined actions, such as isolating compromised devices, blocking suspicious user accounts, or updating access policies, based on real-time threat intelligence and data correlation across the enterprise. This reduces the window of opportunity for attackers, limits lateral movement within the network and ensures that every incident is addressed according to zero-trust protocols.
• Continuous monitoring: Cyber fusion centers leverage deep or machine learning models to analyze trends that can guard against the most sophisticated, man-in-the-middle cyber-attacks. These attacks manipulate communication channels between connected devices and can go undetected for long. With regular audits, cyber fusion centers help security teams assess device health and network traffic, helping detect anomalies. This helps in systematically reviewing security controls, access policies, and compliance posture – ensuring zero-trust measures remain effective and updated in response to evolving threats.

Zero-Trust is a Moving Target

To stay ahead of increasingly frequent and sophisticated attacks, enterprises must move with speed from threat identification to action by integrating data from security platforms, mapping critical dependencies across applications, user roles and environments and acting proactively when even subtle warning signs emerge. Cyber fusion centers become pivotal here, unleashing automation and orchestration across devices, users and access policies. With a collective view of asset health, security incidents, network traffic and user behavior, zero-trust becomes more aligned with changing ground realities.

Supplementing zero-trust with a unified strategy offered by cyber fusion centers, where security operations, identity and access management, user behavior and environments are continuously assessed, enterprises pave the way for the next evolution in cyber defense.