Achieving an Assume Breach Culture Within Your Organization

Do a quick internet search for enterprise security strategy, and you’ll likely come across the term “zero-trust” with varying definitions from some of the biggest names in the tech game. Enterprise security means different things to different people, as the many definitions show us. But key to adopting an effective security strategy is determining a way to effectively reduce the attack aperture and risk—taking a step outside of a standard enterprise security term.

At SolarWinds, instead of adopting only zero-trust, we decided to take reducing the attack aperture and risk a step further. We work from an assume breach mindset to secure our enterprise because we understand the importance of taking as many measures as possible to insulate your environment from security threats. We have built our assume breach mindset into our overarching Secure by Design approach.

Assume breach means we start with assuming something has been breached (a user or asset), look at the possible result, and determine how to limit the exposure. By using the guiding principles of Secure by Design, we aim to eliminate implicit trust in applications and services and assume users aren’t secure and are most likely already compromised regardless of authentication practices. In our everyday practices, we’re moving toward single-pane-of-glass observability insights with integrated artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and AIOps to speed issue discovery, decrease manual errors, and modernize our digital performance.

Does adopting an assume breach mindset makes sense for your business? This whitepaper discusses the current state of breaches, critical considerations for building a security strategy, and what we’ve learned in our journey of adopting an assume breach mindset with observability.