Zero Trust Network for Microservices
Today, every major organization is going through a massive digital transformation, adopting cloud, mobile, microservices, and container technologies to deliver services efficiently, meet critical business demands, and catch up with market expectations. Organizations’ Platform and DevOps teams have to model distributed and multi-cloud applications and services accessible from anywhere and anytime to be agile.?This has given rise to two significant trends within the organizations:
However, application developers now need to address a new set of reliability and security concerns as an increased number of dependencies are consumed via network calls.?When centralized systems were in use, network and endpoint security were easy to achieve and manage a decade ago. The security team could adequately secure the perimeter using a firewall. With the new trend of scattered data in multi-cloud and distributed workloads due to microservices, IT security organizations need to assess their security posture and rethink their network architecture. Of course, security is not a one-man or one department job; it is a shared responsibility among the IT Security, DevOps, and Ops teams in an organization.
This blog will introduce you to Zero Trust Networks and its essential elements that a CISO must consider to make the network robust, free from security vulnerabilities in today’s digital transformation, and reduce potential financial losses.
What is a Zero Trust Network?
Zero trust is a guiding principle that emphasizes that IT organizations build network architecture without trusting any person, application, or device. In this context, ‘Zero’ trust means ‘no implicit’ trust. Enterprise IT cannot assume that external and internal entities are trustworthy, or a one-time assessment of the security risk of any entity will be enough (entities can be applications, people, or traffic).
Zero trust is usually associated with network security, as trust comes into the picture only when there is an exchange of data. Zero trust networking is a method to identify the trustworthiness of any external entity through authentication and monitoring of each network access attempt.?
Why does the industry need Zero Trust Network more than ever?
We want to highlight the most common reasons Zero Trust Networking is more important than ever.
Data breaches in the cloud are prevalent now
Data breaches are going up YoY, damaging companies’ reputations. Still?fresh in my mind, a watershed event is Solarwinds Attack in 2020. Solarwinds Orion, a SaaS-based network monitoring tool, was compromised, the trojan was introduced using a malware attack to get hold of the entire network infrastructure. Although there was no collateral damage like stealing sensitive data or files from any enterprise, the intrusion was found across domains and geographies. Phishing attacks and malware attacks on clouds are usually hard to detect even for advanced companies and are likely to go up in the future. As per the?recent findings?by Verizon, cloud breaches have surpassed on-prem data breaches- 73% of cybersecurity incidents involved external cloud assets in 2021. And one standard recommendation for CISO would be to apply the principles of Zero Trust Network as soon as possible to avoid security breaches.?
Distributed Workloads aren’t secured either, thanks to runtime vector attack
Read the entire article on the Tetrate Blog.
Tetrate, started by Istio founders, provides an application networking platform for platform operators to connect, secure, and observe all cloud-native and hybrid environments. Tetrate has collaborated with the?National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)?to develop standards for Federal agencies to implement zero-trust architecture for their microservices. Follow us on?Twitter and?LinkedIn.
Join us for the joint conference with NIST on January 26 and January 27: ZTA and DevSecOps for Cloud Native Applications.