White Papers: White Paper: CTERA Security Architecture
Integrating security into an enterprise-wide cloud-based file services platform.
Zero Trust
Embrace a New Era of Security – Never Trust, Always Verify
Traditional security models are no longer sufficient. CTERA’s zero-trust architecture verifies every access request, regardless of its origin, safeguarding your organization against breaches and unauthorized access.
Keep Credentials Siloed and Secure
Built around a hub-and-spoke centralized security authority, CTERA’s Zero Trust architecture ensures that edge devices communicate solely with core servers and never possess credentials to access the object storage. Unlike other solutions CTERA gives you 100% control over your environment, with nothing hosted externally—ensuring complete data sovereignty and security.
Leverage CTERA Direct Technology
Our patented technology allows edge devices to communicate directly with the nearest object storage buckets while maintaining security, leveraging a disaggregated architecture to save time, reduce data transfer costs, and lower compute demands.
Manage Access Keys Effectively
Devices never possess access keys for object storage. Instead, every data access request is first submitted to a core server, which digitally signs approved requests. These are then used by the endpoint to interact directly with the object storage.
CTERA's Zero Trust framework prevents unauthorized access and contains threats, minimizing data breach risks.
Enhance Security
Prevent unauthorized access and reduce data breach risks by verifying every access request and continuously monitoring user activity.
Reduce Your Attack Surface
Limit lateral movement and contain threats within the network using micro-segmentation.
Gain Valuable Data Insights
Continuous monitoring and real-time analytics give you a clear view of what’s happening in your network at all times.
Scale Confidently
As your global filesystem scales up to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of sites, the attack surface grows exponentially. Each new site and each connection brings added risk, creating more potential entry points for attackers, making each site a potential weakest link. This is why zero-trust security is essential when scaling. Scaling your infrastructure without zero-trust means scaling your vulnerabilities—but with zero-trust, you scale securely and confidently.
Minimize Insider Threats
Enforce strict access controls to reduce the risk of insider threats. Centrally audit permissions with Varonis and alert on compliance violations. Faithfully enforce Windows ACLs and audit access with supported systems such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Netwrix, and others.
Ensure Compliance
Zero Trust architecture helps by minimizing compliance risks through segmentation and strict data access controls, reducing the likelihood of sensitive data leaks and enabling compliance with global regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more. By adopting a “never trust, always verify” approach, Zero Trust ensures that no entity is trusted by default, and strengthens data privacy with micro-segmentation.
Resources
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FAQ
How does CTERA’s Zero Trust architecture enhance security across the enterprise edge?
Our architecture ensures that edge devices only communicate with core systems over fully authenticated and encrypted channels. Edge devices never store sensitive credentials, eliminating the risk of credential theft or misuse. Additionally, all data access is governed by strict role-based access control (RBAC), ensuring both your users and devices can only interact with authorized resources.
How does CTERA ensure secure communication between edge devices and core storage infrastructure?
We do this through mutual authentication between edge devices and core storage via X.509 certificates. All communication occurs over encrypted channels using TLS 1.3 with perfect forward secrecy (PFS). The centralized security authority ensures continuous verification of the device identity and enforces policies to prevent lateral movement or unauthorized access across the network.
How does CTERA's Zero Trust architecture integrate with existing identity providers (IdPs) for seamless authentication?
We do so via SAML protocols. This integration allows our Zero Trust architecture to enforce centralized authentication and authorization policies across the organization. By leveraging existing IdPs, we enable single sign-on (SSO) and MFA, ensuring that user identities are continuously verified before granting access to resources, enhancing security while simplifying user management for businesses like yours.
Reduce Your Risk of Attack
Explore CTERA’s zero-trust solutions and strengthen your cybersecurity posture; talk to our team.