Unify on-premises and cloud access control with SDP

SDP for on-premises access

For on-premises services, IT can install on servers SDP agents that control the network stack and enforce the "drop all unless specifically sanctioned" policy. Or it can isolate service-providing infrastructure behind gateways, with a gateway controlling all traffic in or out. Either way, control of access to any and all systems can be unified in SDP.

Notably, SDP can be a single path to services even if companies have different directories tracking user identities and groups for different client platforms or services. This is often the case in international organizations, for example. These companies that grow by frequent acquisition and organizations have fragmented IT organizations and service environments, which can benefit greatly from using SDP for access control.

SDP for cloud access

SDP cannot provide the same level of "black hole" protection to SaaS and IaaS as it can to on-premises services. This is because the access points for such services have to face the public internet, and the services themselves are multi-tenant.

However, SDP can provide unifying access controls for cloud services at the same time it protects on-premises users and services.

To be able to benefit from SDP, a cloud environment has to support the enterprise's ability to restrict access to company instances to specific address ranges or domains. Salesforce, AWS and Microsoft 365, among others, support this level of control. By establishing gateways for those environments -- usually themselves in a cloud environment, enterprise-instantiated or in an SDP-as-a-service provider's own infrastructure -- SDP can enforce policies consistently across clouds.

Functioning in this capacity, SDP takes on the role of a cloud access security broker (CASB), providing a unified policy environment and visibility into usage across platforms. Note that there are other CASB functions SDP does not provide -- for example, API-style access to activities within a cloud environment.

SDP is not a single solution for all security challenges, but it can be a means of both dramatically strengthening and simplifying access control in any complex and/or hybrid service environment, especially when implementing zero trust.