6 Benefits of a Zero Trust Model
Companies globally are discovering the core benefits of zero trust. The zero-trust security model becomes more critical as the workforce becomes spread out and fragmented. As employees increasingly work from home on multiple devices — and SaaS solutions become ubiquitous — it’s necessary to take a different approach to securing your enterprise.
Let’s discover the most essential benefits of zero trust for your company, its employees and its data. However, before we dive into the many benefits of a zero-trust model, let’s first answer a critical question.
What Is “Zero Trust”?
The zero-trust model isn’t just about securing confidential data. It’s about controlling access to all corporate resources – not just data, but all IT resources such as applications, user devices and printers and more and more, non-IT devices like building security systems, IOT devices like smart lighting, environmental systems and more.
DHS’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) defines zero trust as a collection of concepts and ideas designed to enforce accurate, least privilege per-request access decisions in information systems and services in the face of a network viewed as compromised.
And a Zero trust architecture, ZTA, is an enterprise’s cybersecurity plan that uses zero-trust concepts and encompasses component relationships, workflow planning, and access policies. Therefore, a zero-trust enterprise is the network infrastructure (physical and virtual), and operational policies that are in place for an enterprise as a product of a ZTA plan.
To help agencies understand how to implement zero trust concepts into their very real IT environments, DHS uses the graphic above as described in their Zero Trust Maturity Model document. The five pillars and three foundational components are defined and described in relationship to a maturity model in that document. The more mature an agency is along the Zero Trust spectrum; the more cross pillar collaboration happens, and more analytics and automation is leveraged.
The Major Benefits of Zero Trust
In short, the major benefits of zero trust relate to better security. But there’s more than just that. As we’ll discuss below, a zero-trust architecture doesn’t just improve security posture — it can improve overall user experience by creating a frictionless authentication solution.
1. Improved Security Measures
The first and most obvious benefit of zero trust is that it improves your company’s security posture. Zero trust requires verified identity and device context — meaning that only authorized users can access corporate resources, and they can only do so from verified devices. In a well implemented Zero Trust environment, asset management is required. This includes understanding the context of endpoints (location, OS version, etc) and allowing user access based on the user and device meeting policy guidelines. Above that, access controls are granular, meaning user to specfic application for additional control.
2. Greater Control
Leveraging the 5-pillar model ensure controls are deployed such as micro-segmentation, based on the policies of the agency. In most networks today, controls are static (think of FW rules) and are limited to a single pillar (device vs network). The more mature deployments of Zero Trust will have automated controls (such as shunting traffic or forcing re-authentication) based on out of policy activity. These controls will also be based on real time anonymous behaviors and multi-pillar analysis.
3. Increased Visibility
Another important benefit of zero trust is that it increases visibility into your network traffic. Beyond continuous authentication, zero trust requires continuous device, network, and application monitoring. Visibility into your environment will be better than ever, and this will allow for anomalous behavior to be identified and addressed. Using analytics tools will allow machines to take on the load of sifting through the good to find the bad. Additionally, AI and ML will be used to provide near real time malware detection and mitigation by leveraging threat intelligent feeds
4. Improved Compliance
Though Zero Trust was created in the private sector, it quickly became a focus for the public sector. NIST(National Institute of Standards and Testing), has worked on defining and providing guidance to achieve Zero Trust over the last 5 years. Based on this pedigree, there is a lot of compliance cross-referencing and delivery as part of the Zero Trust framework.
5. increased Efficiency
As described in the DHS Zero Trust Maturity model, automation is a key component to achieving advanced and optimal status. The goal of automation is to remove the need for human intervention in basic security functions such as patching and updating configurations. This becomes easier as more tools become software defined and agencies move to infrastructure as code methods. These enabling tools will not only make agencies more secure by minimizing human modification, but also make processes more efficient and timelier.
6. A More Secure Future
Finally, zero trust can help you to secure your company’s future. By improving your company’s security posture, you can avoid the costs of data breaches and other security incidents. In addition, by increasing your company’s efficiency with analytics and automation, you can free up staff to work on more strategic tasks. By investing in zero trust now, you can help to ensure a more secure future for your company.
Zero trust is a powerful security model that can help your company to improve its security posture, increase its efficiency and meet compliance requirements. If you’re looking for a way to improve your company’s security, especially in the wake of changes within the IT environment, zero trust may be the right solution.
But building a zero-trust network or implementing zero-trust network access isn’t trivial. When implementing zero trust, you may need help.
Conclusion: Start Moving Toward Zero Trust Today
Zero-trust security is a powerful model. But even with all the benefits of zero trust, organizations may find switching to a zero-trust model intimidating. This requires more than just software; it requires renewed processes, training and an educated security team.
There’s a solution.
An MSP can help assess your organization’s current security position to identify the technology, tools and processes that your organization needs to achieve true zero trust. Rather than having to map out your journey to digital transformation, you can rely on your MSP’s expertise.
Want to learn more about the benefits of zero trust? Contact Red River today.
