Benefits of a Zero Trust Strategy
The benefits that a Zero Trust strategy offers go far beyond security. Here’s a look at just how Zero Trust ensures data protection and its five other valuable benefits.
1. Data Protection
The most apparent benefit of Zero Trust is data protection. Once malware breaches your firewall, it can extract your customer data or intellectual property within seconds. Since 86% of breaches are financially motivated, cybercriminals typically seek out this kind of data. A breach can wreak havoc on your reputation and devastate your competitive advantage. However, when your security paradigm always assumes no trust, bad actors have an infinitely more difficult time stealing data. And combining Zero Trust with just-in-time (JIT) access smoothes business processes while preventing rogue employees from gaining access to data they shouldn’t have.
2. Greater Enterprise Visibility
Because Zero Trust never assumes anyone or anything is trusted, it is continuously monitoring activity. It provides visibility into precisely who (or what) is accessing your network. So you know the time, location, and applications involved. And because you can easily monitor all users, devices, and data, at all times, you can more easily enforce compliance. Governance becomes much more straightforward.
3. Reduced IT Complexity
According to a recent survey, 53% of organizations report a problematic shortage of cybersecurity skills. This means a heavier workload for the security team as a whole. Zero Trust reduces the operational complexity of your security program. While it does take additional hardware and services to implement ZeroTrust, the result is less daily work for the operational staff, easing staffing shortages by increasing efficiency. These gains can be expanded by using a solution that centralizes alerts, usage, and access data, so there are fewer interfaces to manage and monitor operations.
4. Less-Demanding Security Workloads
Security teams monitor and manage everything from risk assessments to access requests and security alerts. Security threats are becoming more sophisticated and targeted, resulting in an overwhelmed team. Automation of tedious low-risk access decisions eases the security burden.
5. A Superior User Experience
When you use automation to implement Zero Trust, users don’t have to wait on administrators to approve every access request so they can work more efficiently. With Zero Trust, identity becomes your new perimeter. You eliminate the need for remote workers to log in to VPNs for certain resources. Instead, users go directly to the resources they need and request access or login. Additionally, overprovisioned VPN gateways that slow down access are no longer required.
6. Support for Cloud Migration
Today’s world is in the cloud. Organizations of all types and sizes are moving to cloud-based infrastructure and cloud software solutions. Legacy software tools weren’t built for the cloud. They don’t function well with cloud-based solutions, exposing the network to every user of any single tool. Zero Trust security is ideal for the cloud, ensuring your network is locked down, and users can only access what they need when they need it.
Check out Benefits of Zero Trust to explore these benefits further.
Key Components of Zero Trust
Let’s dive into the components of Zero Trust and explore how they deliver the benefits described above.
Access Visibility Across the IT Ecosystem
Because organizations are using so many data sources and tools, it’s easy to overlook securing a resource, opening your system to an external breach. Another issue is that users often gain wide-open access to the network when they should only be accessing one or two tools, creating unnecessary risk. Using an IGA or CloudPAM solution, the Zero Trust model secures every component and allows you to monitor all activity.
Read Making the Case for Zero Trust Architecture for more on how to secure your network with Zero Trust.
Based on Identity
Identity drives access control in Zero Trust because it’s the only thing that’s reliable. Contextual identity information (such as average peer usage and the requestor’s roles, permissions, and prior access requests) and device information, user behavior, and peer analytics determine if granting access at the specified level is safe. This process is efficient and limits risk.
Limited Access
The purpose of Zero Trust is to limit as much as possible, giving users access only to what they need, when they need it. This approach prevents users from accessing areas of the network that they shouldn’t or accessing tools longer than they should (such as when an employee moves on to another organization). There are four aspects to access limitation: