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What Is Zero Trust Security Model & How Organizations Can Successfully Implement It

2021-05-07by Priya Kumari

Zero trust security model also sometimes known as perimeterless security describes an approach to the design and implementation of IT systems that is based on a strict identity verification process. The framework dictates that only authenticated and authorized users and devices can access applications and data.

Constantly expanding workforce and trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) have fueled the growth of the hybrid multi-cloud enterprise. For the security teams within an organization, simultaneously a multitude of challenges have cropped up. The security dynamics keep on changing continuously as new users are added, & new APIs are created, making it more difficult for security teams to protect users' data and resources. An effective zero-trust strategy can help organizations better manage the risks of a constantly changing business environment.

The wake of the pandemic has compelled organizations to prioritize their digital transformation efforts like never before. Organizations are tweaking their business models to offer customers the digital experiences they desire while enabling a global and disparate workforce simultaneously.

As users’ data and resources are spread across the globe, it is difficult to connect them quickly and securely. Traditional security enabled a concise perimeter to assess and enforce the trustworthiness of these connections; however, the evolution of business has proven that ‘the perimeter’ is tough to define and a new approach is required.

This is where the zero trust strategy comes in handy. Zero trust has emerged as an essential approach for businesses to take control over their security strategy. Zero trust ensures that all the data and resources can only be accessed on a limited basis and under the right circumstances and are inaccessible by default.

The Scope of Zero Trust Strategy

Zero trust isn’t an easy strategy to implement while it offers the promise of improved security to modern business. Zero trust requires truly coordinated efforts across the security teams. They must comprehend and secure all of the connections that occur across the business – from data to users and from devices to applications. The workloads and networks also need to be secured.

Ensuring coordination between teams can be quite challenging as each business unit and security team is focused on their own priorities, databases, needs, and budgets. Thus, teams working in silos leave the enforcement of security controls in shambles and the resolution of incidents is open to interpretation. Thereby, the organization is still left exposed to risk.

The biggest challenge for the security personnel is to ensure that the entire organization is adhering to the same security policies, in the same way.

The context needs to be properly understood. Collect the details of people connecting to certain resources from a specific device and analyze whether they should be provided with access. Also, evaluate how much access is necessary and for how long. Moreover, one needs to think about what can be done with the access granted to those resources keeping in mind the location the users are in and the devices they are using.

Consider a hypothetical scenario wherein security controls are blocking a legitimate user from accessing resources to do their job, even in the name of security, the business will be impacted. IT security is an exercise in risk mitigation and needs to support an organization’s objectives.

How to Employ Zero Trust to Help Organizations Achieve Operational Success

To successfully implement zero trust security teams must collect and use information across the business and accurately define the context necessary to make quick decisions about the trustworthiness of each connection.

Context is the foundation of a zero trust theory. Strategic enforcement of such a model helps organizations speed the process of securely authorizing connections to keep business moving.

Here are the four pillars of establishing a successful zero-trust organizational model:

a)    Define Context

A reference should be imperative to start with. For creating coordinated security policies organizations must understand what users, data, and resources are connecting across the business. The key definitions need to be included and there needs to be an agreement on parameters to ensure that each team is authorizing and enforcing connections consistently. The resources need to be discovered and classified based on risk, defining granular resource boundaries and separating users according to roles and duties.

 

b)   Verification and Enforcement

Once the policies are in place and the context has been defined, organizations need to continuously verify that every connection is trustworthy at that moment. This requires actively monitoring and validating all the requests against the conditions defined in your policies to make the process of granting "just enough" access to the right resources quick enough and hassle-free. Organizations need to continually analyze and improve these verification actions for different business scenarios. 


c)   
Resolve Incidents

Irrespective of all the policies in place, organizations must always plan for anomalies. There might often be unknown threats streaming and these might impact the new business situations. All these situations must be resolved by security teams with minimum or no impact on the business. This requires preparation and taking targeted actions such as revoking access for individual users or devices, adjusting network segmentation, quarantining users, wiping devices, and creating incidents' tickets or generating compliance reports.

 

d)   Analyze, Improvise and Improve

Security is never completely "done." It is an ever-going process. The same goes for zero trust. Organizations must continually improve their security posture by adjusting policies and practices to make faster, more informed decisions. This requires continuous evaluation and adjusting of the policies, authorization actions, and remediation tactics to tighten the perimeter around each resource. It's also bigger than just improving security decisions at the policy level. Security teams must also constantly review their policies and enforcement against the backdrop and goals of the business.

Wrap Up

Unlike traditional perimeter-based security, Zero trust enables the businesses while adapting the firm’s security architecture to support new user populations (such as employees, partners, customers and patients), customer engagement models, rapid cloud adoption, and new IoT devices and sensors.

Enterprises, in general, have the earliest and most rapid success if they focus on improving identity management and device security. The two core components of the Zero Trust eXtended (ZTX) ecosystem drive rapid risk reduction and build confidence with executives that their organizations can quickly reap the rewards from the Zero Trust program.

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Author

Priya Kumari

Priya has about 6 years of experience in Market Research. Currently, she is working for Valasys Media, as a content writer, which is one of the top global business consulting companies. They provide their clients with an array of services such as Lead Generation, Database Management, Information Technology - IMS, Account-Based Marketing to name a few. Their services are personalized to help the clients meet their business goals & optimize their Return on Investment (ROI). She has been preparing several personalized reports for our clients & has done a lot of research on market segmentation, cluster analysis of audiences & inbound methodologies. She has worked with government institutes as well as corporate houses in several projects.

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