The Rise of Zero Trust
Businesses embraced digital transformation to capitalize on the cloud benefits of scalability, efficiency, and cost reduction. As cloud migration accelerated, it altered the threat landscape and simultaneously shifted the work environment to improve accessibility. Long gone are the days where we must solely protect PCs inside an on-premises network. Today, security teams are tasked with protecting many types of devices that access data from multiple external locations.
Critical assets migrated as well, and no longer strictly reside behind heavily fortified internal networks. Today, they are spread throughout multiple physical locations worldwide – and stored in the cloud. This shift has forever changed the threat landscape, and bad actors have taken notice. External attacks on cloud accounts increased by 630% in 2020. And insider threats now account for over 30% of all breaches – proof that standing trust is dangerous, even for ‘trusted’ employees. This dynamic threat landscape has forced businesses to rethink their approach to securing digital assets and cloud resources.
As the world becomes a more digital, globally connected environment, the core Zero Trust principles resonate stronger than ever. Today’s security landscape no longer allows you to focus solely on your enterprise network. Advancing technology adoption and accelerating digital transformation requires a perimeter drawn at the identity layer. Modern security is about providing the right access to humans and machines and the continuous optimization of access controls based on the risk profiles for the entities accessing these resources. Now we must shift to a ‘never trust, always verify’ approach, secured by an identity-based Zero Trust paradigm.
What is Zero Trust Identity?
Zero Trust Identity requires a continuous risk and trust assessment every time access is attempted using contextual identity information to inform and optimize access policies. This also supports the principle of least privilege and granting access to the right entities, for the right reasons, for the right amount of time.
Zero Trust Identity is the practical application of identity to support and strengthen Zero Trust principles. To move at the speed of business, a Zero Trust Identity approach requires quickly delivering stronger security without negatively impacting productivity, or business agility.
So how do you move toward Zero Trust Identity? The answer to that lies in understanding and applying the three key aspects of Zero Trust — mindset, strategy, and architecture.