How to Implement Zero Trust Security: Business leaders have strategic goals and objectives to provide unique services to their target customers and increase the market share in the chosen industries. Changing regulatory requirements with growing privacy and cyber security regulations, potential data breaches across business sectors and adoption of digital platforms in consumer segments has changed the business executives to strengthen the cyber security posture of their critical business assets. In that context, implementation of Neoteric Security conceptions like the implementation of Zero Trust serves as a boost to the security of the organization.
‘Zero Trust’ is the most trusted security concept that helps businesses to enhance their security operational controls to reduce cyber risks. Implementation of Zero Trust in your organization requires the adoption of below five key steps.
- Define vision and strategy
- Design ‘Zero Trust’ use- cases
- Implement Zero Trust security solutions and technologies
- Integrate security technologies
- Innovate and enhance the Zero trust maturity adoption
Define vision and strategy
IT security leaders should have clear guidance while defining zero trust strategy based on its fundamental principle – ‘never trust – always verify’. Zero trust is not defined as a security perimeter or to differentiate traffic between ‘trusted network’ and ‘untrusted network’. Zero trust strategy should be bound to applications centric and user-centric and not infrastructure-centric. With Zero trust adoption – all the traffic sessions must authenticate and require authorization. A combination of ways to implement ‘Zero trust’ includes micro-segmentation, software defined perimeter, identity aware proxy, and zero trust network access.
IT security leaders should find answers to the below questions while defining vision and strategy.
Do the communications are secure regardless of network location?
Does the user authentication are strictly enforced and are dynamic?
Do critical applications are invisible to attackers?
Does a secure micro tunnel protect per session limited to per user from per applications?
Design ‘Zero Trust’ use cases
Organizations based on business requirements – need to define critical use-cases that require the adoption of ‘Zero Trust’ concepts to reduce the business risk, enhance productivity, and adhere to regulatory compliance. Increased adoption of ‘Work from home’ during COVID pandemic situation has made IT security leaders to find ways to secure access to corporate resources. Traditional VPN solutions are ineffective in today’s modern workplace strategies.
Most organizations are implementing ‘Zero trust network access’ solutions for secure access to the resources from anywhere and with any devices – as their workforce varies between employees, contractors, partners, 3rd party users and they use more than one end-user computing systems to access resources. It could be a company provided laptop or personal computing devices (BYOD) or smartphones.
Organizations adopting DevOps require simple and secure access to software development, as the landing zone shall be multi-cloud environments or on-premise data centers. They need to dynamically provision and de-provision access to virtual machines, PaaS, and IaaS workloads. IT security leaders need to prioritize the use-cases that qualify for ‘Zero Trust’ based on business requirements
How to Implement Zero Trust security solutions and technologies
Organizations should prefer ‘Zero Trust’ security solutions and technologies that are purpose built on cloud that avoids complex administration and maintenance of platform components.
Implementing ‘Zero trust security solutions and technologies’ shall help customers overcome challenges including a focus on host-based security problems, loopholes with access management for granular access to applications, backhaul traffic requirements and bandwidth consumption to data centers and cloud, the client becomes hostile of DDoS attack victim and managing VPN/Network-based security solutions. ‘Zero trust network access’ solutions from providers like InstaSafe as ‘services’ that reduces the Opex and helps customers to focus on their core business process. InstaSafe provides deployment advisory services that ease the rollout of ‘Zero Trust’ security solutions with expertise solution architecture to deploy the solutions, efficient project management, and governance to ensure that business risks are mitigated.
Integrate security technologies
Effective collaboration and exchange of intelligence compound the power of effective security solution deployments. Integration helps security solutions to complement the functionalities and features that are required for the business. Enterprise identity provider management solution provides authentication, authorization, and helps to provide granular access to resources. Security informatisecuritynon and event management solutions help security operations to detect and perform incident response management for potential data breach attempts and store logs for a specific duration for audit and compliance purposes. Organizations should prefer ‘Zero Trust’ security technologies that are open for integration with leading technology providers
Innovate and enhance the Zero trust maturity adoption
Modern applications, advancements of technologies, and increased adoption of consumerization require constant innovation on the existing ‘Zero Trust’ security solutions that providers like ‘InstaSafe’ enhance the product capabilities.
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