Zero Trust Principles Strengthen Your Organization’s Security Posture
The top obstacle preventing innovation? In 2024, it’s the gaps in technology skills and knowledge that companies have, according to the annual Insight-commissioned Foundry survey. The gaps make it challenging to stay updated with security vulnerabilities, user security and patching, all of which leave organizations vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks. Attacks can in turn disrupt operations, not to mention the loss of confidential data and significant costs. In fact, 43% of organizations report being impacted by a cybersecurity breach over the past 12 months preceding the release of the report.
If your organization is experiencing these challenges, it may be time to consider enhancing your Zero Trust maturity level. Zero Trust is an architectural approach that prioritizes protecting critical assets and data by following the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Designing solutions around this principle enables organizations to automate processes and procedures, improving productivity and reducing human error. Implementing solutions such as least privilege access or network segmentation can also limit the lateral movement of attacks. As security breaches are more a matter of “when” instead of “if,” designing solutions to minimize their impact is crucial for business sustainability.
What is Zero Trust architecture?
Zero Trust architecture focuses on five key pillars, utilizing the “never trust, always verify” principle to establish policies, processes and procedures that enhance cybersecurity posture. They are: users and identities (human and non-human), devices, data, network, and workloads and applications.
To effectively govern Zero Trust architecture policies, organizations must integrate security operations. This involves implementing visibility and analytics tools to detect anomalous behavior and enable real-time decision-making. A mature Zero Trust architecture incorporates automation and orchestration to manage events and responses wherever possible.
The start of your Zero Trust journey
You have to consider all aspects of an organization to design effective security solutions. To ensure comprehensive security, you must put a business continuity plan in place and test it periodically. Here are three recommendations to start you off on the right foot in your Zero Trust journey:
1. Consider people, processes and technologies. Implementing a tool to safeguard against malicious emails is a good start. However, it’s equally important to ensure users receive regular training on identifying malicious email links. Similarly, you can benefit from a robust patch management policy and vulnerability scanning technology, but your team must also have the necessary resources and knowledge to perform remediation efforts when necessary. Simply acquiring a tool to prevent a threat is not enough to minimize threat exposure. The people and processes must align alongside it.
2. Enhance your identity management solution. Strengthen your identity management by implementing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). You should alternatively consider advanced solutions like password-less technologies to minimize the risks of “MFA fatigue” or “push bombing.” Meanwhile, reducing your number of administrative accounts and adopting just-in-time access solutions is also recommended. These steps each apply to human and non-human accounts, particularly those with access to business-critical assets.
3. Know your assets and how they are being managed. It may sound simple, but understanding which assets you have and how they are managed can be complex. Security is rarely straightforward. At a minimum, perform inventory on your business-critical assets, proactively identify vulnerabilities and put remediation efforts in place to address those vulnerabilities.
Make life hard on hackers.
Your organization’s security is always a high priority. It’s critical to take proactive measures to minimize the risks of a breach. If you do get breached, you should at least have confidence in having taken all necessary precautions to prevent the breach from spreading throughout your environment.
· Learn more about strategies to design effective security solutions based on Zero Trust architecture in this ebook.
· Take next steps to improve your organization’s Zero Trust maturity level with the Insight Zero Trust Assessment. Rest assured: It’s designed not to take up much of your time and without requiring access to your security environment.
