Happy Tuesday!
This is the first of our two-part series which discusses what Zero Trust is, how you can implement it, and the many benefits it can bring to your organization.
But first, to better understand how secure your organizational data is, how well can you answer the following questions about your organization?
- Do you have visibility into device compliance, cloud environments, and logins to detect anomalous activity?
- Are you analysing productivity and security signals to help drive user experience optimization through self-healing and actionable insights?
- Is your most sensitive data encrypted both at rest and in transit so only authorized (internal/external) users can access them?
At AEGIS INNOVATORS, we believe implementing a Zero Trust framework will not only help you protect your data, but also position your organization to better navigate the fast pace in which our world is transforming. Modernizing your technology foundation with Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance is where you should start as it takes the most holistic approach compared to any other solution in the market today.
Our President, Reza Palizban, gives a brief overview here.
What exactly is Zero Trust?
A phrase that is not just a ‘buzz word,’ and has been increasingly used recently by governmental bodies, enterprise organizations and leading cybersecurity experts. Zero Trust is a framework that considers the entire digital estate of an organization, enabling robust security of each component to minimize organizational threats. It segments and secures your organization’s national and global networks including hosting models (private/public cloud and on-premises).
“The Zero Trust model assumes breach and verifies each request as though it originates from an open network. Regardless of where the request originates or what resource it accesses, Zero Trust teaches us to “never trust, always verify.” Every access request is fully authenticated, authorized, and encrypted before granting access.”
Microsoft
The Zero Trust Architecture
The below diagram shows how a Zero Trust policy is fully imbedded within an organization and the importance of integrating policy enforcement and automation, threat intelligence, and threat protection across security components. These integrated elements act upon telemetry across every component to inform decisions with real-time signals.
I know Zero Trust and implementing its framework within your organization is a little complicated and can be overwhelming, though let us explore the three main pillars to Zero Trust and what they mean:
- Verify Explicitly: Rather than assuming everything within the corporate network is already protected and verified, the Zero Trust model verifies each request as though it originated from an open network. By controlling access to company resources based on a series of set conditions. These conditions are pre-determined by your organization.
- Assume Breach: The Zero Trust model always assumes that cyberattacks are persistent and consistent, particularly as cyber criminals are becoming increasingly advanced and sophisticated.
- Least Privileged: Restricting and controlling access to users on the necessary basis of what their role responsibilities are. The Zero Trust model sets out this pillar to eliminate users to prevent the installation of malicious software, for example.
These pillars are applied across a comprehensive control plane to provide multiple layers of defense. These Zero Trust defense areas are:
- Identities
- Endpoints
- Applications
- Networks
- Infrastructure
- Data
These layers combined are your organization’s wheelhouse and at the very core is where your most valuable possession is – data. Microsoft 365 and Azure are designed with Zero Trust as a core Architectural principle. The key is end-to-end visibility – bringing all this together with threat intelligence, risk detection and conditional access policies to reason over access requests and automate response across each defense above.
This is powerful because organizational workforces are spanned across offices, hybrid, and remote working environments, which means that your data is offered the same level of protection irrespective of where your workforce is. This leads to maintained and in some cases increased productivity.
Why is Zero Trust Necessary?
If The White House is speaking about Zero Trust, you know it is important and that it is something that you should be considering…
Zero Trust provides impactful benefits to your business such as:
- Increased productivity through business agility and empowered workforces who can work anywhere, anytime;
- Risk mitigation through protecting organizational and client data and adhering to compliance and risk regulatory requirements; and
- Cloud migration from on-premises systems to enable digital transformation with intelligent security for complex environments.
I mean, who wouldn’t want that for their organization?!
At the end of this week, we’ll share the second part of our series entailing how to implement the Zero Trust model including the organizational policies that can assist you organization and the Zero Trust Maturity Model which helps to assess your Zero Trust readiness. Plus, we have a special announcement.
To learn more about what we do visit our website. Alternatively, if you want to get straight to implementing the Zero Trust model into your organization then Book a time with Matt.
