Zero trust security is essential for all businesses with a digital presence. It is a strategic approach that verifies every user and device has access after confirming who they say they are. Many cloud environments host critical enterprise apps and data, so they are vulnerable to attackers wishing to steal or hold for ransom sensitive and private data. Zero trust reduces the attack surface area and can limit the severity and impact of an attack if credentials become compromised or firewalls are breached.
Each user must undergo an evaluation when requesting access to the network and this is based on the user type, their location, and other features that can help identify a user. Zero trust then grants access for a certain time period and only allows users to access what they should. These mechanisms can significantly reduce risk and enhance security control while increasing visibility and productivity, and making better use of your IT resources.
As many employees continue to work from home, businesses have relied on single sign-on to allow their users to gain access to a multitude of hosted services. However, this verification method should be combined with multi-factor authentication to enhance an enterprise’s security process. This makes the end-user experience much less smooth though. By using zero trust mechanisms, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms learn what constitutes as “normal” user behaviour and allows businesses to detect unusual activity that deviates from regular patterns, blocking access until the user can be verified.
The effectiveness of zero trust requires continuous analytics and monitoring that allows a business’s IT professionals to investigate suspicious access requests rather than monitor each and every request individually. This is a huge benefit to most organisations as a recent 2021 study found 60% of business’s claim a lack of cybersecurity professionals is placing their operations at risk. By safely automating the security process with zero trust mechanisms, you are reducing the burden on human resources and allow IT professionals to focus on innovation instead. Zero trust also optimises your current security processes by introducing a centralised monitoring system that can provide valuable insights into user behaviour and generate reliable streams of data.
Zero trust also allows shared responsibility for security between cloud vendors and the organisation which can further enhance your business’s safeguards. Furthermore, by properly implementing a zero trust strategy, your enterprise can ensure it is deploying a robust ‘least privilege’ mechanism so suppliers, vendors, partners, and customers are not gaining access to applications, infrastructure, and data that they should not otherwise be able to access. This is employed by zero trust’s foundation of “always verify” every user, no matter what.
By enforcing these access controls from anywhere the user connects from, the business no longer requires employees to ensure their devices are patched and their networks aren’t compromised. Many employees may be IT illiterate or fail to follow basic IT hygiene, but that is no longer an issue when zero trust is enforced.
