How Zero Trust and SASE Can Work Together

Remote access is no longer optional. Organizations around the world are trying to maintain efficiency and productivity, but are struggling with security and data protection. Traditionally, Virtual Private Networks (VPN), Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and Virtualization or Virtual Machines have sufficed as temporary arrangements to help employees work remotely. However, legacy remote connectivity options are no longer secure enough to handle the modern workflow.

How your business can benefit from SASE Zero Trust and ZTNA

The simple and cold truth is that neither companies nor employees, clients or cloud service providers can trust anyone to strictly follow security protocols. Hence, the Zero Trust approach to security is rapidly gaining adoption.

Zero Trust Security Model Needs Secure Network Access for Better Effectiveness at Every Request:

Companies are rapidly prioritizing the Zero Trust security model which essentially treats all employees and data access requests with suspicion. It is, however, important to note that the Zero Trust model is only effective if companies and their network security agencies enforce policies proactively and consistently across an organization’s entire network infrastructure.

Essentially Zero Trust security model has evolved to Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). Although it sounds complicated, it simply means even the core network access is treated with suspicion even if trusted login credentials are used. Traditional VPN platforms only vetted accounts at the entry points, but considered them trustworthy after that. However, ZTNA mandates the establishment of trust and authentication of credentials whenever any accounts request access to network and its assets.

What is SASE?

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a network and security concept that builds upon ZTNA and fundamentally integrates Zero Trust functionality. This enables the security model to perform stricter access management across an organization’s entire Wide Area Network (WAN).

SASE is essentially the next evolutionary step to securing WAN. It takes the optimized network routing capabilities of Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) and infuses a full security stack. The security parameter is available as a cloud-native solution. This means companies that regularly deal with data stored in the cloud infrastructure can also benefit from the same.

How SASE Is Important During Zero Trust Security Model Implementation:

When SASE combines with the Zero Trust security model, any network traffic moving across a company’s WAN is automatically subjected to inspection by the SASE security services. Needless to add, this makes implementing Zero Trust security on the corporate WAN very effective.

While Zero Trust looks after Access Management, SASE offers visibility into and control over network traffic. A SASE solution performs traffic inspection. It is always looking for potentially malicious or dangerous content or undesired as well as unauthorized network access.

A Zero Trust Security Model needs a very clear idea about how the data within the network is accessed and who is accessing the same. Needless to add, SASE offers precisely this.

It is critical that all traffic passing over the corporate WAN goes through at least one SASE security service. Hence, it is important to note that SASE needs clearly defined and managed access control policies. SASE will allow only legitimate traffic, while any attempts to gain access to data or network areas using unauthorized means, is restricted.

How Businesses Can Benefit from SASE and Zero Trust Security Model?

For a very long time, businesses relied on a perimeter-focused security model. This model was based on the flawed assumption that there was a specific boundary for networks. In other words, everything outside the network perimeter was considered untrustworthy, but everything and everyone inside the network was considered trusted.

Needless to mention, such an approach to security has several limitations and flaws. This is because cybercriminals are increasingly using valid login credentials to perform “Lateral Movement Attacks”. As threats use legitimate accounts, the older security model does not intercept potentially malicious access requests. Zero Trust and SASE, on the other hand, temporarily grant limited access based upon need-to-know and business needs. It does not offer any concession or assumes the accounts are trustworthy, no matter the account and its location.

SASE effectively combines networking and security functionality and offers the same in a cloud-based application. Companies that adopt SASE as part of the Zero Trust security protocol, gain benefits such as secure remote access, comprehensive security inspection, and optimized networking. Moreover, this is applicable throughout an organization’s network infrastructure.

Conclusion:

It is important to note that any security platform is only as good as the implementation and enforcement. An organization may have role-based access control policies. However, if inappropriate access requests are not detected and blocked, all efforts at securing a network and data, are futile.

Similarly, inconsistent enforcement of security policies across the enterprise network is troublesome owing to the successful penetration of threat actors within an otherwise secure network. Hence, proper implementation, data storage, and access management policies need to be properly formulated and implemented.