What is Zero Trust Security and Benefits Of Using it?

Zero Trust is a strategic approach to cybersecurity that secures an organization by eliminating implicit trust and continuously validating every stage of digital interaction.

The Zero Trust security model assumes a breach and verifies every request as though it initiates from an open network. Regardless of where the request originates or what resources are accessed, the Zero Trust approach teaches us never to trust and always verify.

This model ensures that the right people have access to the essential resources in the right context and that access is assessed continuously by the users frictionlessly. But this doesn’t happen overnight.

The Principles of Zero Trust Security

1. Constant Monitoring and Validation

The Zero Trust network philosophy assumes that attackers reside both within and outside the network, so no machines/users should be automatically trusted. Zero Trust will verify user identity, privileges, and device identity and security. The logins, connections time-out, and devices will be re-verified again and again.

2. Least Privilege

One of the essential principles of Zero Trust security is least privilege access. It means giving users only as much access as they need. This will minimize users' exposure to critical areas of the network. It is implementing the least privilege involves sensibly managing users' permissions.

3. Device Access Control

Zero Trust also requires firm controls on device access and user access controls. The Zero Trust system monitors how many unique devices are trying to access an organization's network, ensures every device is authorized and assesses all the devices to ensure they are not compromised. It minimizes the attack surface of the network.

4. Micro-Segmentation

Micro-Segmentation breaks security perimeters into smaller zones to maintain separate access for different parts of the network. Zero Trust leverages micro-segmentation to ensure that a user with access to one of those zones cannot access any other zone without separate authorization.

5. Prevent Lateral Movement

When an attacker gains access to a network while moving within the network, it is called lateral movement. These movements can be difficult to detect even if the attacker's entry point is discovered because the attacker might have entered other parts of the network.

6. Multi-Factor Authentication

MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication) is the golden bullet of the Zero Trust Security gun. It is an umbrella term for verifying end-user's identity with a password and at least one other way of authentication. The other way of authenticating can be through email, SMS, phone, mobile push, hardware tokens, authenticator apps, biometrics, or other means. MFA ensures that the user accounts stay secure even if the credentials are compromised.

Benefits Of Using Zero Trust Security

1. Reduce the complexity of the security stack:

Applying security with legacy technologies is greatly expensive and complicated. The standard perimeter mostly consists of hardware or virtual appliances for access control, security mechanisms, and application delivery and performance utilities.

To operate in a global setting, these security stacks will have to be repeated for redundancy and high availability across data centres and regions. Each of these components will have to be separately purchased, installed, configured, and deployed for each data centre in several localities.

Administrators will be responsible for managing all of this equipment in-house by handling ongoing monitoring, troubleshooting, upgrades, and patching. Cloud-based zero trust models are capable of removing that complexity by moving all of these functions to a cloud-services approach.

2. Resolve security skills shortage:

With the ongoing spread of cybercrimes, threats are becoming more refined and tools are also available to help criminals in developing, installing, and monetizing templated attacks, such as ransomware-a-service and malware-as-a-service.

It is employed in the cloud, and because of this, organizations that adopt this process need not install a complicated stack of security equipment used for protecting all data centres. To secure all of their data, users, devices, and applications, organizations can just use a single service in the cloud.

Besides decreasing the number of security professionals needed for monitoring, handling, updating, securing, and improving security controls, organizations employing zero trust will also be able to retask resources, assign business-critical efforts, and carry out proactive planning measures in order to more senior members of IT, eventually reducing costs.

3. Protect business and customer data:

After successfully getting onto an end-user machine within the free firewall, malware will go ahead and exfiltrate customer data to a command and control (CnC) server placed outside of the network.

Permitting sensitive and confidential customer data to get into the wrong hands can have grave consequences for both your business and your customers. Hence, zero trust security will help safeguard all such details and prevent them from being misused.

4. Deliver excellent security and end-user experience

Users compromise on security when they try to remember complicated passwords by writing them down, or even by using easy-to-remember passwords. Secure access, ease to use, and productivity.

Cloud-based zero trust architecture is known to enhance the performance and help deliver a continuous user experience across a wide range of devices and network conditions.

5. Lower breach detection time and attain visibility into enterprise traffic

Zero trust follows the principle that location is not an indicator of trust, hence the network is presumed to be hostile.

The principle of “trust but verify ” is replaced with “always verify and never trust” , with visibility being the foundation of verification.