How To Secure Your Workforce with Zero Trust Model

The workplace is constantly evolving.?

Looking back over the last 20 years, you'll see how much has changed.?

Right?

Today, fax machines, file cabinets, and long days at the office are obsolete.?

In this digital era, people can now work from anywhere, on any device, and at any time.

Of course, technology is the driving force behind these new workplace capabilities.?

Employees now have the hardware and software they need to do their jobs from anywhere. However, new opportunities always bring new challenges.?

And the most significant one since the advent of work-from-anywhere has undoubtedly been cybersecurity.

So how can you go about this?

Find out in this article.

What is zero trust??

At its most basic, zero trust is a security approach based on the principle of "Never trust; always verify." It is a perimeter-less form of security that focuses on the user's identity rather than where they log in.

Zero trust is more of a strategy than a solution or technology; it is an overarching goal for security that you can achieve by tailoring your current security solutions, company policies, and workplace culture.

Below are the three principles that guide the zero-trust model.

• Trust: Zero Trust mandates that all networks, devices, and users get treated as untrustworthy at first. Before they can access corporate files and resources, users must authenticate their identities.
• Least-privilege model: Zero Trust advocates the principle of least privilege, in which employees have enough corporate access to complete their tasks but no access to unnecessary sensitive files.
• Assume a breach: Another day, another breach. That is what a Zero Trust approach advocates; it is about maintaining a proactive, alert mentality - looking for signs of a potential breach at every turn so that a security incident can be detected before it escalates.

How Zero Trust Security Works

Data security is at the heart of Zero Trust. Hackers are after information deemed valuable by organizations. Zero Trust prioritizes data activity monitoring.

To create the best Zero Trust security strategy, prioritize the following areas:

1. Data: A Zero Trust begins with data protection and adds additional security layers. Assume an attacker can breach your perimeter defences, take advantage of a misconfiguration, or bribe an insider. In that case, under Zero Trust, they will have limited access to important data due to the rules in place.
2. Networks: In order to steal data, attackers must be able to navigate your network, but Zero Trust networks make this extremely difficult. Using technology to restrict your Zero Trust network will make it more resistant to cyber criminals.
3. Users: Humans are most likely your security strategy's weakest link. Users' access to resources on internal and external networks should be limited, monitored, and strictly enforced. Before granting users access to your network, verify all user activity. Monitor users to guard against infrequent but unavoidable human errors.
4. Workloads: A workload is the entire set of applications and back-end software that allows customers to interact with your company.?
5. Devices: Each instrument, from smartphones and PCs to connected IoT devices, represents a potential entry point for attackers. Security teams should isolate, secure, and control all network devices to achieve a Zero Trust environment.
6. Visibility and analytics: You need to provide complete visibility of your IT environment to your security and incident response teams to enforce zero trust principles. You can then use advanced threat detection to keep track of any potential threats in your network and detect abnormal behavior in real time.
7. Automation and orchestration: Automation keeps your Zero Trust security systems running and enforcing policies consistently. You need to automate as much of your monitoring, remediation, and threat-detection systems as possible to save time and bandwidth for your security and operations teams.

Zero-Trust Best Practices to Protect Your Workforce

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Implementing a zero-trust philosophy and integrating solutions to meet those needs can be difficult. It is critical to remember that zero trust does not occur overnight. Workers must adjust to new ways of accessing company devices. Still, they have already demonstrated that they can make significant changes simply by participating in the remote workplace environment.

To avoid overwhelming their workforce with new policies, businesses should gradually implement zero-trust policies.?

It would help establish a solid foundation based on zero trust to maximize your cybersecurity efforts. This entails implementing zero trust across machines, devices, users, platforms, APIs, and other systems.

Here are some key practices businesses can implement to protect their organizations from zero-trust threats.

Holistic Cybersecurity Integration

Today's hackers are brilliant and skilled at various tactics, techniques, and procedures for infiltrating business networks. Integrating tools, controls, and telemetry across the enterprise allows organizations to implement and enforce cybersecurity policies consistently.?

Secure by Design

Integrating security into systems and processes from the start can aid in adoption. A security-first approach across product life cycles and operational stages creates a secure workplace while mitigating cybersecurity risks.

Third-party Risk Management

You should apply zero trust outside the organization's internal operations and communication. It would be best to incorporate this into your privacy policies and vendor-facing applications.

Cybersecurity Awareness Education

Technology can only do so much to prevent data breaches caused by human error. Therefore, employee education and cybersecurity awareness are critical practices for businesses to implement throughout the organization, from the C-suite to entry-level workers. Teach your employees to recognize phishing scams, secure access protocols, and techniques for keeping their devices secure.

Establish Identity-based Trust

Identity-based trust is a defining feature of zero-trust policies. Organizations should develop a clear process for identifying users (and machines). Businesses, for example, should require users to assert information about their identity when creating company accounts so that they can be verified and authenticated at each login.

Risk-based Authentication

Similarly to establishing trust based on identity, each authentication request must be evaluated using context and composite event data. To ensure the network is secure as possible, zero-trust implementations assume that users are malicious until authenticated.

Unified Policy Enforcement

Access policies for disjointed and fragmented users leave room for bad actors to exploit organizations. Although their locations and working environments differ, in-office, remote, and hybrid employees must all follow the same accessibility policies.

Response, Threat Intelligence, and Automation

Finally, automating threat intelligence and response protocols is a must in zero-trust frameworks.?

Automation can help with productivity, monitoring, and mitigating data breaches because businesses that implement zero-trust are constantly looking for threats and operate under the assumption that a threat is always lurking on the network.

Implementing Zero-Trust Policies for Your Workforce

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Planning for a zero-trust architecture requires collaboration between personnel and data to assess cybersecurity gaps and develop a strategy for enforcing more stringent security policies.?

According to NIST zero-trust guidelines, here's how to implement zero-trust policies for remote and hybrid workers.

Prepare

To begin, teams must prepare to implement zero-trust policies by conducting a thorough inventory of resources, network identities, roles, and privileges. This step is concerned with preparing businesses to manage risks in light of current cybersecurity conditions.

Categorize

Following that, teams must classify resources based on confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Resources and workflows are either low, moderate, or high risk. Then, teams can attack each item based on its risk category.

Select

Teams must decide which zero-trust policies to implement for each attack surface. Furthermore, the teams can add or remove extra controls to manage risks associated with specific resources and workflows.

Implement

At this point, IT teams should implement the plans outlined in the previous steps. At this stage, keep future monitoring and maintenance operations in mind, and avoid solutions that require numerous human actions.?

PS: Zero-trust is most effective when combined with dynamic automated tools.

Assess

Following the implementation of zero-trust policies, teams must evaluate their progress and report any impact on cybersecurity. Regarding zero trust, the teams should regularly assess controls to address changing needs over time.

Monitor?

Organizations must monitor their resources, from endpoint hygiene and user behavior to network traffic and everything in between, to achieve zero trust. There are numerous ways to accomplish this, and teams should use the solutions that make the most sense for their organization and automate wherever possible for the best results.

Leveraging Zero Trust For Hybrid Workforces

Employers in all industries have adapted to an ever-changing work environment since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Many businesses, for example, had to shift their operations and leverage distributed networks to support remote work.

Companies discovered that many job responsibilities could be performed remotely throughout the pandemic, eliminating the need for employees to visit the office physically.?

Then, what does this mean for a company's cybersecurity if this remote work trend continues?

According to an Accenture research report, 63% of high-growth companies have adopted hybrid work, which some refer to as a "productivity anywhere" workforce model.?

Furthermore, the report indicates that the majority of workers prefer hybrid work. Nonetheless, various factors influence whether they would thrive working on or off-site.

As a result, the modern workforce is becoming more mobile and digital.?

With new technologies such as smartphones and cloud computing, there is a growing demand for increased bandwidth in businesses and home offices.

Companies are considering zero-trust security architectures to adapt to these significant changes. It provides enhanced protection for businesses and safeguards their most valuable assets.

Companies implementing zero-trust security will be more resilient to ongoing cybersecurity threats.

Getting Started With Zero Trust

Businesses interested in implementing zero-trust security should classify and map the data flow throughout their system.?

They can then start developing granular identity and access management based on how they must secure specific assets and which users and systems must have access to them.

Businesses should select a strong security partner that enables granular permissions, network segmentation, and strong visibility and analytics to accomplish this.?

This is made possible by Azion's platform, which includes products such as Real-Time Metrics, Network Layer Protection, and Data Streaming.?

Furthermore, as a serverless edge provider, you can use our global edge network to process data locally in accordance with geo-specific data privacy laws, as well as simplify security tasks with a serverless platform that handles infrastructure security so you can focus on securing your data and applications.

Schedule a personalized demo with our experts to learn more about how Azion can help strengthen and simplify your security.