SpartanTec, Inc. Wilmington: What is a Zero Trust Architecture?

One of the latest buzzword when it comes to cybersecurity is zero trust. You need to know what zero trust is and what it’s not.

Zero trust is a strategic effort that can help prevent a successful data breach by getting rid of the concept that the network architecture of a network is trustworthy. It is based on the principle to never trust and always verify. Zero trust is made to protect the digital environments by using network segmentation, prevention of lateral movement, and the simplification of granular user access control.

Conventional cybersecurity models work on the outdated assumption that everything inside the network of a company can be trusted. This is a broken trust model that assumed that the identity of a user isn’t compromised and that every user will act responsibly and could be trusted.

The zero trust model knows that trust is considered as a vulnerability. Once it is on the network, the users as well as the malicious insiders and threat actors can move laterally freely and exfiltrate or access all the data that they’re not limited to. Keep in mind that the attack’s infiltration point is generally not the target location.

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A Zero Trust Architecture

You will identify a protect surface under a zero trust model. This surface is comprised of the most valuable and critical data, services, applications, and assets of a network. Each organization will have a unique protect surface.

Once you’ve identified the protect surface, you can determine how traffic will move across the company in relation to its protect surface. You can determine and set in place a policy that will ensure safe and secure access to your data. When you know the interdependencies between the users, services, infrastructure, and the DAAS, you can set up specific controls as near to the protect surface as you can. This will help create a microperimeter surrounding it, which will move together with the protect surface.

Zero trust does not depend on your location, the users, application workloads, and devices can be found everywhere and that’s why you cannot tie zero trust in a single location. It should be spread across the whole digital environment. You have to make sure that the right users will have access to the right data and applications.

Users also access data and application from different areas like small branches, offices, coffee shops, and even at home. Zero trust needs consistent control, enforcement, and visibility to be delivered through the cloud or directly on the device. You can prevent data loss and secure user access by having a software defined perimeter, regardless of where the users are located, which devices are used, where the data and workloads are hosted.

Workloads are very dynamic and they move across different data centers and hybrid, private, and public clouds. With zero trust, you should have a deep visibility into the interdependencies and visibility across devices, users, networks, data, and applications.

Many believe that achieving zero trust to improve their network security Wilmington NC is complex and costly. But zero trust is actually developed on your existing architecture and do not need you to get rid and replace your current technology. You will find no zero trust products. There are products that work perfectly well with zero trust environments. It’s easy to deploy zero trust. It’s easy to implement and maintain. You just need to identify the protect surface, map out the transaction movements, create a zero trust architecture, create a zero trust policy, and monitor and maintain regularly.