Zero Trust Architecture And Its Benefits For Organizations

With the rapid growth of cloud computing, mobile devices, the internet of things, remote workforces, hybrid workplaces, etc. the cyber security landscape has grown increasingly complex than ever. Digital transformation is shaping the new normal and forces re-evaluation of the security models. The older security models around perimeter level security are insufficient to prevent lateral movement inside the network.

A?Zero Trust Architecture?is a system design approach where the inherent trust is removed from the network, designed to prevent data breaches and limit internal lateral movement. The network is treated as compromised and therefore hostile. It is based on the foundational principles of “never trust, always verify”, “approve and authorize every single request”, “apply least privileges” and “always assume breach”.

In order to improve protection against the internal and external threats, and increase the overall security posture of the organization, Zero Trust provides protection in digitally prominent environments by leveraging network segmentation, preventing lateral movement inside the internal network, providing 7 layer threat prevention, and simplifying granular level user-access control.

Any functional organization requires elaborate planning to shield, control and keep a track of organizational IT infrastructure. However, it is impossible to build a need-specific framework from scratch every time. Among the various publicly available methodologies that security leaders have been admitting to benefit their own infosec programs, the zero-trust security model has gained maximum popularity. This model differs from other security framework approaches from both a methodology and benefits perspective.

National Cyber Security Center’s?Zero Trust Architecture Design Principles can help implementing in your environment:

1. Know your architecture including users, devices, services and data
2. Know your user, service and device identities
3. Asses your user behavior, devices and services health
4. Use policies to authorize requests
5. Authenticate and authorize everywhere
6. Focusing your monitoring on users, devices and services
7. Don’t trust any network, including your own
8. Choose services designed for zero trust

In contrast, to the traditional model that follows the basic principle of treating outsiders as not trusted entities and those inside as trustworthy, zero trust has no boundaries and everyone has to undergo the test of authentication and authorization. While severely restrictive, the zero-trust architecture simulates a completely secured environment that shields any unauthorized entry or access to sensitive data and digital assets that are crucial to any company. This shift is in response to the continuous increase of users, autonomous IoT devices and networked applications a corporate network supports.

Business benefits of Zero-Trust Architecture:

A zero-trust framework is a reliable, holistic approach that can be adopted by any organization for its long list of security benefits. Given below are six cyber security business benefits that come with zero-trust architecture.

1. Asset Discovery enables Risk Assessment

Zero Trust Architecture operates on the principles such as knowing your architecture and the identities of the users, devices, services and data. Discovery and identification of users, devices, services and data enable the risk assessment of the inventory to define the policies for governing authentication and authorization for access requests.

2. Improved visibility of user behavior and activity

Zero Trust encourages host-based monitoring. Enhancing logging to include events from user devices and services provide better insights into the environment. Measuring user behavior and device status will provide confidence in cyber hygiene and the health of the devices, which can be fed into the policy. Unique identities of the users and devices will help the policy engine to evaluate the access request. Monitoring of user behavior, device health, service health combined with infrastructure and network monitoring can help to detect anomalies and threats to initiate remediation actions or feed into the policy for preventing further access.

3. Enhances the User-experience

The first concern of end-users in regards to IT security is often related to keeping a track of the passwords that give access to applications and secured data that facilitate and enable the process of performing duties. Enabling single sign-on (SSO) on all enterprise services will enhance the user experience and simplify the secured login process. This, in turn, helps in organizing infrastructure resources that need to be accessible. It allows users to authenticate and gain access to the needed documents eliminating chances of password mismanagement by enabling multi-factor authentication.

4. Streamlines the authentication and authorization process

Traditional security models had independently operating security tools that are configured to the specifics. Zero trust provides a better solution using the policy engine that is central to the entire organization, that authenticates and authorizes every access request. The monitoring feeds, logs and signals are continuously evaluated prior to authorizing access so that in case there is any abnormality detected, the access can be denied.

5. Provides flexibility and support for cloud, on-premise, hybrid and remote work

With the rapid technological advancement and the need to incorporate them into business in a short duration is a necessity. Prior to zero-trust architectures, moving applications and data from private data centers to a cloud environment, or vice versa, forced a security administrator to manually recreate security policy at the new location. It is an exhausting process that demands time, effort and is prone to errors that leads to chances of security compromise. Zero Trust Architecture provides a flexible solution to manage the security in cloud or on-premise or hybrid environments or remote work using the policy engine.

6. Enhanced Overall Security Posture

Zero-trust architectures can enhance the overall security posture and protect organizations against loss of data in an age where data breach threats are high. Considering the high stakes of a data breach, business leaders should make it a priority to implement the Zero rust Architecture properly to shield themselves from the unpredictable loss risks and huge penalties.

Article References:

https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-207/final

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/zero-trust-architecture

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/zero-trust

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