Introduction

The world has changed considerably after the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier, businesses had physical offices where the employees worked out. After the pandemic, organizations have had to adopt remote work to maintain social distancing to prevent the virus from spreading.

Remote work has been a nightmare for cybersecurity professionals. To completely change the IT infrastructure for remote access is a challenge but defending it from cyber attacks is a herculean task! Before the pandemic, you could easily define your network perimeter and prevent an outsider from gaining access to the internal network. But remote work and dependence on cloud technologies have dissolved the network perimeter and made it much harder to protect the business!

Luckily, the Zero Trust model allows companies to secure their remote work environment and prevent hackers from gaining easy access to company resources. Furthermore, it empowers the users to work securely from anywhere, anytime, on any device, increasing the organization’s efficiency!

What is Zero Trust?

Simply put, the Zero Trust principle is “never trust, always verify.” Every access request is fully authenticated, authorized, and encrypted before granting access. It treats each request as though it originates from an open network and is in stark contrast to the earlier, widely adopted principle of accepting all access requests within the company firewall as genuine and safe!

Zero Trust requires identity verification for each user and device when attempting to access resources on the network, even if the user or device is already within the network perimeter. It also allows companies to limit a user’s access once inside the network – reducing the chance of lateral movement of a hacker who has gained access to a user’s account.

The zero trust model is based on three principles:

Verify Explicitly

Always authenticate and authorize requests based on available data – user identity, location, device health, workload, data classification, and anomalies

Use least privileged access

Only provide the bare minimum access (and time) for each user to get his job done. This principle will make it easy for you to secure your data and network by limiting an impact of a compromised account.

Assume Breach

Develop your IT and security architecture in such a way that it contains and minimizes the impact of a hack. Practices such as end-to-end encryption, analytics, visibility, threat detections, and network segmentations are some measures you can take to improve your defenses.

How do you build Zero Trust into your organization?

Zero Trust, like cybersecurity, is not a standalone product but a mindset. It must be implemented across the entire digital landscape, with its philosophy adopted by your entire company. This approach requires the implementation of various existing technologies and governance processes to secure the IT environment.

Micro-segmentation

Micro-segmentation has been around for years and involves categorizing network assets, users, applications, and data stores into logical groups. Through VLANs, the networks are segmented into their enclaves. A next-gen firewall at each segmentation allows you to control who, what, where, and when someone connects.

This practice reduces the risk to the organization by decreasing the total attack surface of a security incident. If a hacker gains access to a user, he will only gain access to that micro-network and cannot gain lateral access across the organization network.

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

IAM automates the authentication of users ad manages the appropriate levels of access for each user. There are many open-source IAM tools available for small businesses.

Principle of Least Privilege

This principle focuses on only providing the minimum level of access possible to a user, providing only those needed resources, rather than access to the entire business’s resources and network. In effect, this prevents a hacker from gaining further access than what the victim is permitted.

Multi-Factor Authentication

Enhancing passwords with MFA and additional level verification steps can determine the level of access granted. This practice is a great tool to authenticate the user’s identity and prevents any malicious actor from gaining unlawful access to the particular account.

Endpoint Security

Like authenticating users, endpoint security verifies that a device is genuine, trustworthy, and free of malware. Verified users must enroll their devices so that they are recognized. If the user request access from a registered device they use every day, they have a certain level of Trust. However, if they try to access services from another device in a café that they have never used before, there is no trust.

Further, endpoint security will ensure that only devices with a minimum set of security standards can access the network. Thereby preventing jail-broken, legacy systems from connecting to the network.

Real-time data analytics

Gaining real-time visibility is one of the foundations for zero Trust. Zero Trust is based on making risk-based decisions that are based on real-time data.

Security Policy

A security policy that clearly defines which user and device have access to which is required in enabling an effective zero trust security model in an organization. Only the business owner that has a complete understanding of the operations can define the policy. The policy must also cover the time at which a user can access a particular resource and how they access it.

What are the benefits of Zero Trust?

Cloud Migration made easy

Zero Trust is a scalable security model that makes it much easier for businesses to transform their company into a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. It reduces the risk of cloud deployments and allows remote workers to access resources while improving governance and compliance.

Increases efficiency

A Zero Trust approach can help an organization identify business processes, data flows, users, data, and associated risks. It allows businesses to be agile in this increasingly complex and competitive world, allowing access to your staff from anywhere at any time while maintaining a high-security posture.

Easier cyber-attack detection

Through Zero Trust, you can easily detect phishing, lateral movement, exfiltration of data, and other methods. Businesses find it easier to scale with Zero Trust as it quickly expands security protection across multiple computing environments, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

Easily identifies insider threats

The Zero Trust architecture protects companies from insider threats – something that was not possible in the traditional network security, which followed “trust but verify” method. With continual monitoring of users and devices, it will be much easier to spot and control unjustified access to company resources.

Cost-saving through simplification of the security stack

While Zero Trust comprises various existing technologies, it uses them in a much more efficient manner, requiring you to purchase and use minimum security products. Therefore, your business will spend less money on cybersecurity and make the entire process more efficient.

Closing Remarks

The old security method does not provide business agility, user experience, and protections needed for a rapidly evolving digital landscape. We must, therefore, move towards Zero Trust to enable the new normal of working anywhere, with anyone at any time.

The Zero Trust security model is most effective when integrated across the entire digital landscape. The traditional security model of castle and moat is no longer relevant as the castle itself does not exist in isolation as it once did. Companies now have applications on-premises and in the cloud, with users accessing the applications using various devices from locations spread worldwide!

Zero Trust can seem daunting at first. However, like any complex task, it can be made easier by breaking it down into phases and focusing on the critical parts first. Our article will help you get started with zero Trust.

Zero Trust is a crucial survival skill for digital transformation – Microsoft