Today people can work whenever and wherever they want, making the traditional office environment no longer relevant. Users and apps can be accessed outside your protected office network just as they are inside. But this means continual data transfers between SaaS apps, IaaS, data centers, remote users, IoT devices, and other sources; meaning cybercriminals can exploit more points of entry.
Once hackers get access to your network, they can leave traces of malicious code simply with the purpose of staying undetected for an average of 6 months as they search for and steal sensitive data. Traditional user access methods involving ‘trust but verify’ are irrelevant in these cases.
What is Zero Trust Security Model?
John Kindervag, a lead analyst with Forrester Research, came up with the concept of the Zero Trust Network (also known as the Zero Trust Architecture) in 2010. To reduce the probability of hackers gaining access to sensitive data, organizations can restrict who can acquire privileged access to different parts of their networks or individual systems.
The zero trust model refers to extensively verifying the credentials of anyone (and anything) attempting to access protected network resources from within or beyond the network's perimeter. The policy evolved from "trust but verify" to "never trust, always verify." Many businesses aim to implement a zero trust security strategy, because of how robust it is.
Zero trust relies on technologies like multi-factor authentication, analytics, encryption, and file permissions to achieve its goal. In a zero trust environment, regulations should include granting users only the minimum access required to complete a specified task. It also allows configuring the network access parameters via Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
The zero trust model supports micro-segmentation, which helps IT isolate certain parts of the network from spreading any potential dangers through the organization.
How does Zero Trust Network Access work?
Zero trust network access, also known as ZTNA, is a component of a zero trust architecture that uses identity-based authentication to establish trust and provide access while concealing the IP address. ZTNA gives IT, and security teams centralized control and increased flexibility to secure widely distributed IT systems by adjusting access to certain apps or data at a particular time, location, or device.
The Zero Trust Network Access has some features that help organizations fortify their network security:
- Manage the traffic on the network between all the resources
- Provide cloud access after identity validation
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other forms of authentication
- Identifying network access and application access
- Least-privileged user access across all services (IaaS, SaaS, and on-premises)
- Enhanced network perimeter protection
- Increased efficiency in application operation
- Better security against more advanced threats
ZTNA functions similarly to a software-defined perimeter (SDP) in that it hides most of the underlying network and its supporting services by establishing encrypted, one-to-one connections between devices and their required resources. It protects the network from threats like attempted access to restricted data or downloads of unusually large amounts of data at unexpected times, allowing businesses to scale their remote user and IoT environments safely.
Things to consider while implementing a Zero Trust Security Model
A zero trust model needs the deployment of robust authentication methods, processes to identify, enforce, and adapt user access controls, and tools to develop and integrate software-defined security perimeters whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Keep these basic questions in mind while planning to implement a zero trust solution:
- How quickly can a system be deployed and put into use? What restrictions, if any, does the service provider impose on you to deploy their solution?
- Do zero trust solutions readily provide support for various public cloud providers? Can you safely deploy workloads to several cloud providers?
- Does the zero trust solution encrypt data securely? Is it possible to use your own encryption keys, and if so, where are they stored?
- What kind of scalability issues does the zero-trust solution have? Does it perform well with your processes?
- How secure is the solution provider's infrastructure? Does it rely on external methods, or can it offer supplemental security features like DDoS protection at the application access level?
- What kind of visibility do the solution offer about content and malicious/abnormal behavior in the background traffic?
- Does the proposed solution add any value to the existing network infrastructure?
Learn where your current security measures fall short and how the zero trust solution may address those areas with added value, functionality, and risk mitigation. Once these questions have satisfactory answers, you can move forward with implementing the zero trust model.
The implementation of the Zero Trust Model involves five steps:
- Find out what you need to protect: users, data, services, and the network
- Determine the transaction flows within the network
- Understand the different technologies and configurations needed
- Develop your own optimized Zero Trust framework
- Perform regular checks and maintenance on the system
Organizations must determine which workloads are eligible for this implementation to reap the benefits of zero trust security. This includes determining each workload's significance and the maximum risk amount. Without this knowledge, it will be hard to implement the fine-grained controls necessary to safeguard the resources at stake. Also, the security team should be ready to conduct regular network audits.