Modern security spans both the physical and digital landscapes, and organizations today face rising risks across both. From network breaches to unauthorized facility access, new vulnerabilities emerge every day, often at the intersection of cyber and physical security.
Relying solely on digital firewalls while overlooking physical safeguards, or securing a building without protecting the networks within it, leaves critical gaps that attackers can exploit.
True protection requires an integrated approach, one that unites physical and digital defenses into a cohesive, adaptive security strategy. This convergence strengthens the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your operations. Below, discover how Fognigma helps organizations build and operationalize this unified security posture.
What Makes a Good Combined Security Approach?
Before we discuss how to implement a combined security approach, you’ll want to know the pillars or foundations that this kind of hybrid strategy looks like. It’s not enough to just have both; you need both working together and seamlessly to help strengthen every other aspect of your organization.
Here are the digital and physical security foundations to know about:
Physical Security Foundations
The tangible world of locks, guards, and gates is a critical component of defense against real-world threats. Key traits or elements include:
- Robust Access Control Systems: These are the first line of defense, governing who can enter a facility, room, or secure area. This includes everything from traditional locks and keycards to advanced biometric scanners.
- Physical Hardening: This involves reinforcing buildings, perimeters, and critical infrastructure against forced entry, environmental hazards, and direct attack. Think reinforced walls, secure enclosures for servers, and redundant power supplies.
- Identity and Credential Management: The process of verifying an individual’s identity and issuing physical credentials (like a Common Access Card) is fundamental. This means that only authorized personnel can approach sensitive assets.
Digital Security Foundations and Layers Involved
The digital domain requires its own set of sophisticated defenses designed to protect data and networks from the inside out:
- Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA): The core principle is “never trust, always verify.” ZTA assumes no user or device is inherently trustworthy, requiring strict verification for every access request, regardless of its origin.
- Advanced Network Protection Strategies: A solid network protection strategy encompasses firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and software-defined networking to control traffic flow, identify malicious activity, and isolate threats before they can spread.
- Network Segmentation: Dividing a network into smaller, isolated segments, or microsegments, prevents damage if one part is compromised. An attacker who breaches a non-critical network cannot easily move laterally to access mission-critical systems.
- End-to-End Encryption: Data must be protected both in transit across networks and at rest on servers or endpoints. Strong encryption means that even if data is intercepted, it remains unreadable and unusable.
- Continuous Monitoring: Real-time monitoring and logging of both network traffic and physical access events provide the visibility needed to detect anomalies and respond to incidents swiftly.
Mapping Physical Risks to Digital Controls
Any organization can benefit from hybrid security solutions. It’s all about how you map them out across domains. Fognigma is here to help you reduce real-world risks with services like access control systems, cyber-physical security procedures, and more. It can be hard to find an automated system that reduces reaction time and minimizes the window of opportunity for an adversary, but Fognigma is here to guide you to those solutions.
Secure Infrastructure Design for the Modern World
Cyberattacks happen every day, and your organization needs to take steps to make sure that your data is protected from outside threats.
To do this, you don’t just think about the digital landscape being intruded upon; you also need to consider the physical landscape. We suggest implementing a secure infrastructure design that prioritizes facilities, networks, and other key pieces of infrastructure to make sure they are all protected, no matter what.
To do this, you’ll want to always have physical access to your control system. Integrated security protocols can help make sure everything is under a watchful eye, including sharing data, communication, surveillance cameras, and more.
In addition, make sure your networks are invisible to unauthorized users. You can do this by having ephemeral or compartmentalized networks in place. All of these hybrid privacy solutions are extremely important in protecting your organization’s overall operations on the ground and online.
Data Protection Best Practices
Organizations everywhere can benefit from having secure, reliable best practices in mind for safety in the digital and physical landscapes. Ultimately, the goal is to protect all data, no matter what. With a hybrid security model in place, you can do just that.
Here are some of our data protection best practices we give our clients:
- Governance and Classification: Clearly define policies for how data is labeled (e.g., Classified, CUI, FOUO), stored as private data, and handled based on its sensitivity.
- Secure Cross-Domain Workflows: Data often needs to move between networks of different classification levels. This must be managed through accredited cross-domain solutions that inspect and sanitize data to prevent spillage.
- Comprehensive Auditability: Every physical access event and digital transaction must be logged in an immutable, searchable audit trail. This is essential for forensic analysis, compliance reporting, and identifying insider threats.
- Insider Risk Mitigation: The most sophisticated perimeter defenses can be bypassed by a trusted insider. A hybrid approach helps by correlating digital activity (e.g., large data downloads) with physical behavior (e.g., unusual after-hours access) to spot anomalies that may indicate an insider threat.
- Resilience and Continuity: Plan for a contested environment. Your systems must be resilient, with secure backup and restoration capabilities that guarantee you can maintain operations even if a facility is compromised or a network is under attack.
Hybrid Security for the Digital Age
In the digital age, security is all about the tight connection between the physical world and the digital one.
As adversaries get smarter, confidence comes from solutions that work together as one across doors, devices, networks, and data. That’s where Fognigma security comes in. We team up with defense organizations to design, roll out, and run next‑generation, integrated security architectures so that your mission stays protected from every angle, physical and digital.
Want to strengthen your organization? Let’s talk. Reach out to Fognigma to schedule a hybrid security assessment for your team today.