What Is Zero Trust Architecture In Cybersecurity?
Zero Trust Architecture is a framework for cybersecurity and a network security model that strictly monitors identity and authentication for an organization.
ZTA follows the stern principle of trusting no one accessing a network, not even if they are internal members of the organization. It continues to verify the user using robust authentication methods, achieving layer 7 threat prevention.
ZTA restricts a user’s network access to the bare minimum required for their specific tasks, minimizing unnecessary privileges and reducing the attack surface. In the past, traditional security architectures had this strong belief that anything operating from inside an organization could be trusted. The old model had many flaws, basically allowing insider threats to access all files and data, which proved to be fatal for companies.
How does Zero Trust Architecture Work?
ZTA has cemented this strong principle, “Trust no one, verify everyone and everything.” It doesn’t trust anyone connected to the network, not even the company’s C-level executives. Before granting a user access to the system, it verifies the person, and the device used to log in, and imposes privilege restrictions to limit access to data they do not need.
A practical Zero Trust Architecture works best when all the users are routed through a proxy, allowing users to access the application directly without connecting to the network first. Routing access through a proxy makes it much easier to counter any user with malignant intentions.
Before accessing the application, each user has to go through three steps of the architecture’s process.
Step 1: Identity Verification
When a user tries to access the system, the zero trust architecture severs their connection and subjects itself to three questions, “who, what, and where.”. This helps the architecture verify their identity and understand the context of this connection request.
Step 2: Controlling The Risk
After verifying the user and applying access controls to them, Zero Trust Architecture proceeds to evaluate the risk involved with letting the user into the system. Based on the severity of the risk, it then moves to the next step.
Step 3: Implementing Policies
The risks’ severity helps the architecture decide whether the user should be let in. If the risks are low, the user can access the system, enforced with all the security policies fed to the architecture.
Benefits Of Zero Trust Architecture
Organizations of all sorts love Zero Trust Architecture, as they witness fewer threats and data breaches from their system. We have outlined some of the zero trust benefits below.
Protecting the System from External and Internal Threats:
Intruding into a system from outside is relatively complex for hackers. As they need to use several methods to get in and exploit your data successfully. Some significant methods used by threat actors to attack a system externally include phishing attacks, malicious code, Trojans, DDoS attacks, etc.
External attackers primarily target an organization insider to gain access quickly. An unintended click on a phishing link opens the whole system to a hacker in seconds. Other than that, there are also employees in a company who intend to fiddle with the system, hoping to earn some money by selling company secrets.
With the Zero Trust Framework in action, Insiders and Outsiders are treated the same way when verifying their access to the network. Significantly reducing risks to your system.
Increasing Visibility on Data Access:
Access controls are a big plus in zero trust security, allowing users only to access the required data. The architecture is pre-loaded with data monitoring capabilities, which helps monitor how the user uses the data. This helps miraculously to identify any malicious activity and implement security measures.
Makes It Easy To Migrate To The Cloud:
Cloud migration has been rampant recently, with more companies opting for cloud-based environments. However, there are a lot of companies who are concerned about the amount of control they have over the cloud. Zero Trust strategy helps mitigate that by allowing the companies to place access control and data monitoring systems, making the cloud a more desirable place to be in.
Helps To Protect Sensitive Data:
Data breaches can be fatal for a company, and securing sensitive data should be its utmost priority. Zero Trust Architecture comes as a savior in this case. Besides its data monitoring and access control features, it also helps ensure that all the data is encrypted at rest and while being transferred, in turn, reducing data breaches.
Detect And Mitigate Threats Faster:
Zero Trust Architecture operates with a machine learning model that helps to automate threat detection and countermeasures. When a breach is detected, the framework mitigates the threat quickly before the impact materializes.
Adhering To Regulatory Compliance:
By uplifting the overall security measures in your organization, you are, in a sense, fulfilling all the regulatory requirements relative to your industry.
Steps of Implementing Zero Trust
Developing a Zero Trust Architecture is essential to any company serious about protecting sensitive data. You can follow these zero trust principles to develop an effective Zero Trust Architecture Framework.
- Defining An Attack Surface: Identifying the probable surface attack is essential for Zero Trust cyber security. This includes all your devices, databases, applications, clients, and networks.
- Controlling Network Traffic: Implementing network controls to your network helps you monitor its traffic and identify anything malicious.
- Implementing Zero Trust: Now comes the part where you implement the core principle of Zero Trust, “Trusting no one on the network.”.Applying Multi-Factor Authentication for vetting users before granting access and setting up a next-gen firewall for segmenting the network can help to achieve this.
- Real-time Network Monitoring: Constantly monitoring your network can ensure real-time protection for your system. This also helps to identify threats and mitigate them rapidly.
Zero Trust Use Cases
Companies hire remote workers more these days as it is considered more productive. These remote workers often need to access IT assets from a different location, which can pose risks to the network. Other than remote workers, Multinational companies have branches worldwide connected to the HQ. ZTA ensures security in these connected locations.
Third-party vendors and other contractors often need to connect to a company’s digital assets to provide their services, and it is also essential to secure these connections.
A report by Cisco predicted there will be approximately 14.7 billion IoT devices by 2023. IoT devices are the most vulnerable devices that cyber attackers can easily hack. Therefore, IoT devices connected to a network need to be secured by a framework such as Zero Trust Policy.
What Are The Main Zero Trust Best Practices?
These are some of the best practices you can implement for zero trust architecture.
Verifying User With MFA:
Multi-factor authentication can help reduce hacks by phishing and malware attacks by replacing user IDs and passwords. MFA is used to authenticate a user’s identity before they are granted access to the server. Multi-layered security should be applied at every stage or process in your company, even if it is very minor.
Validating The Devices:
Verifying a device connected to the network is just as important as verifying the users. A compromised account can be used from any device, and your system needs to detect that. Allowing only trusted devices to access your system can be a great way to reduce threats.
Keep Your Security Measures Updated:
An effective security system needs to be constantly updated to keep it at par with new threats emerging in the market. Always ensure you have resources ready to update your system or change the required components.
Implementing Access Limit:
Employees often have too much access to company resources and data. This puts your company at risk just in case one of your employees has compromised accounts or devices. Access limit provides the least possible access to your staff, allowing them to view and use the required data to complete their tasks.
Why Choose CloudDefense.AI as Your Zero Trust Solution?
CloudDefense.AI is a CNAPP that is highly dependent on Zero-trust principles which makes it an ideal choice as a zero trust solution. They offer faster and deeper scans by tightening gaps; they disrupt backdoor data access of dark web dealers. Auto-shrink common intrusion failure points via multiple repos and team checks and demonstrates internal verifications and segregation of duties to critical stakeholders.
Adhering to compliance is made easy with insights to drive data-based decisions with one easy-to-digest report. Organizational gaps are priority flagged, and they allow you to use Airtight Checklists to demonstrate organizational compliance across regulatory bodies (HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, and CCPA).
Many attacks are outside-in: the insurance sector is vulnerable as it relies on third-party endpoints for software, billing, tech support, OSS, and reports. CloudDefense.AI SAST constantly checks for security rule violations between source and target branches.
FAQ
Check out some of people’s queries regarding Zero Trust Architecture.
What are the 7 pillars of Zero Trust Architecture?
These are the 7 Zero Trust Pillars:
- Making sure devices are secured.
- Make sure the network is secured.
- Implementing a Zero-trust principle to protect data.
- Implementing automation for zero trust architecture.
- Increasing visibility on all activities.
- Making sure the employees are kept secure.
- Protecting all IT assets involved in the country.
What is the main goal of Zero Trust?
Zero trust mainly wants to protect your system by regulating the access your users are given and constantly verifying their identity.
Why Zero Trust is the future?
Zero trust is a robust security system that people love. In an age where it is tough to trust any new connection to the system, the zero trust approach can be considered a future security feature. Plus, the rise of cloud computing asks for a security feature that can adapt to its scalability.
What are the three main concepts of Zero Trust?
The three main concepts of a zero trust model are awareness of all the risks involved, implementing privilege controls, and constantly verifying all users and devices trying to connect to the system.
Conclusion
A shift to cloud computing meant that companies could run more efficiently, but also introduced more security challenges when it came to protecting sensitive data. According to IBM’s 2023 Data Breach report, the average cost of a data breach is $4.45 Million this year. This is highly alarming and also tells us how expensive data breaches can be for a company.
The inception of Zero Trust Architecture has greatly helped in solving this one big problem that cloud computing had, making it more effective. A robust security feature that is as strict as it should be to protect your expensive data and other company resources.
