---
layout: docs
page_title: Security Models - Overview
description: >-
  Security models are the set of requirements and recommendations for securely operating a Consul deployment. Learn about security models and how they differ between environments.
---

# Security models overview

Requirements and recommendations for operating a secure Consul deployment may vary drastically depending on your
intended workloads, operating system, and environment. Consul is not secure by default, but can be configured to satisfy
the security requirements for a wide-range of use cases from local developer environments without any configuration to
container orchestrators in-production with ACL authorization, and mTLS authentication.

## Core

The core Consul product provides several options for enabling encryption, authentication, and authorization
controls for a cluster. You can read more about the various personas, recommendations, requirements, and threats
[here](/consul/docs/security/security-models/core).

## NIA

[Network Infrastructure Automation](/consul/docs/nia) (NIA) enables dynamic updates to network infrastructure devices triggered
by service changes. Both the core Consul product's configuration and the configuration for the `consul-terraform-sync`
daemon used by NIA can affect the security of your deployment. You can read more about the various personas,
recommendations, requirements, and threats [here](/consul/docs/security/security-models/nia).