What is edge security?

Edge computing moves data processing and applications out of a centralized on-premises datacenter or public cloud to physical locations near users and data. By placing computing services closer to these locations, organizations can use latency sensitive applications and benefit from faster, more reliable services and data-driven decision making. 

Edge security refers to the combination of tools and practices used to protect edge infrastructure and workloads in remote locations where on-site expertise may be limited. It includes protecting valuable data that is generated and processed farthest from an organization's on-premises data center or public cloud. Edge security is essential as the attack surface grows as the edge architecture scales out.

The key to security is recognizing the need for an ongoing, holistic security approach because security goes beyond just implementing perimeter walls. With security approaches like zero trust, gaps in architecture can be closed, and IT environments and organizations will protect your IT environment and organization.

Zero-trust environments are at the core of how to secure at the edge, as edge devices often do not have the firewalls and other security infrastructure that exists in a data center. Those devices are often physically vulnerable in remote unsecured locations and are inherently more vulnerable to physical attacks and must be managed as an untrusted node.

As the popularity of edge computing grows, organizations are challenged to secure their infrastructure and workloads in locations with limited to no-onsite expertise. Computing at the edge can often involve heterogeneous software and hardware that is hard to manage and maintain,  adding additional complexity to ensuring up to date security policies and processes are in place. 

Organizations need to continuously analyze their edge environments to keep track of edge devices, predict security risks, and recommend actions. Key challenges to securing edge architectures include: 

• Limited or intermittent network access: These limitations make it difficult to update edge devices and adds a lack of security visibility when offline. 
• Physical tampering and attacks: Due to the remote nature of edge environments, physical protection isn’t always guaranteed, and there’s an increased risk of theft and supply chain attacks.
• Preventing human error in edge security: Many edge locations are not staffed with IT or networking specialists,  introducing numerous potential attack vectors.
• Edge device management at scale: With hundreds to hundreds of thousands of devices to manage, ensuring systems are up to date and include needed security patches, can challenge teams who need to ensure a strong security posture across the organization. 

Because edge infrastructure and workloads are not in a protected data center with controlled physical access, they are more susceptible to physical tampering and cyberattacks vulnerabilities.

Workloads deployed at the edge are often tied to a company’s core business such as retail point of sale systems, sensors on manufacturing lines, and connected medical devices in healthcare as examples. Ensuring steady operations of these key workloads, while protecting the data that is being processed becomes essential. 

The top three greatest risk security incidents within or from edge systems are: 

1. Cyberattacks from malicious insiders
2. Cyberattacks from outside attackers
3. Vulnerabilities of not knowing the health of edge devices

When powering your business with edge, it’s important to secure hardware when it's outside of the physical environment of the data center. First, you want to address the physical access challenges by protecting deployments. Next, you want to protect the infrastructure by attacking surface growth as the architecture scales out. Lastly, you protect your workloads with a secure software supply chain. Edge security provides a way to protect against zero-day threats, malware, and other vulnerabilities at the point of access, especially as the attack surface grows.

Red Hat’s approach to edge and hybrid cloud security prioritizes the integration of security throughout the entire infrastructure and application stack and life cycle. Red Hat works to help you build security into applications, deploy applications onto a hardened platform, and manage, automate, and adapt your infrastructure and applications as security and compliance requirements change.

With the varied use cases for edge computing, Red Hat is focused on providing an extensive set of security capabilities across our portfolio which includes Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat Device Edge, Red Hat OpenShift with Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Red Hat’s edge computing solutions approach to edge security can help your business:

• Deploy at the edge with a stable foundation
• Manage complexity at the edge
• Monitor the edge 24x7
• Boost security for both traditional and containerized environments