What is Continuous Adaptive Risk Trust Assessment (CARTA)?

Continuous Adaptive Risk Trust Assessment is a security framework and strategy developed by Gartner. CARTA represents a modern approach to cybersecurity that adapts to the evolving threat landscape and the changing needs of organizations. It emphasizes a dynamic, risk-based approach to security rather than a traditional, static, and perimeter-focused one.

Key principles and components of CARTA include the following:

1. Continuous Monitoring: CARTA focuses on real-time, continuous monitoring of an organization’s environment, including networks, applications, and user behavior. This ongoing surveillance allows for the detection of anomalies and security incidents as they happen.
2. Risk-Based Approach: CARTA places an emphasis on understanding and managing risk. It prioritizes security efforts based on the actual risk profile of an organization, its assets, and the evolving threat landscape.
3. Adaptive Security: The framework promotes the use of adaptive security technologies, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to detect and respond to threats in real time. These technologies can help security teams better understand the context of events and adapt their defenses accordingly.
4. Trust and Verify: Instead of relying solely on perimeter defenses, CARTA advocates a “trust but verify” approach, where users and devices are trusted by default but their trustworthiness is continuously verified. This means constantly assessing the security posture of all components in the environment.
5. Zero Trust: CARTA aligns with the Zero Trust security model, which assumes that no element of the network or user should be trusted implicitly. Access to resources is restricted and verified on a need-to-know basis, regardless of whether a user is inside or outside the network perimeter.
6. Threat Intelligence Integration: CARTA encourages the use of threat intelligence to keep security teams informed about emerging threats and vulnerabilities. This information is integrated into security operations and helps organizations stay proactive in their defenses.
7. Agile and DevSecOps: CARTA encourages organizations to integrate security into their development processes and DevOps pipelines, enabling security to be “baked in” rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

By adopting CARTA principles, organizations can better adapt to the constantly changing threat landscape and be more proactive in their security posture. This approach recognizes that traditional, static security measures are insufficient in today’s dynamic and interconnected world, where threats can emerge from various sources and vectors.