Get a fresh approach to keep pace with rapidly changing cyberthreats and the shift to hybrid work. Create action items for Zero Trust adoption at your organization with this comprehensive playbook.

Zero Trust is widely accepted and has been praised by cybersecurity authorities for over a decade. Large enterprises and industry leaders use Zero Trust and adoption is growing as more organizations adopt remote and hybrid work.

Zero Trust is important because organizations need threat protection against the latest cyberattacks and a way to support secure remote work. Due to the rapid increase in threats and high cost of responding to a data breach, Zero Trust has become even more important in recent years.

Zero Trust network security means not trusting an identity just because it has gained access to a network. Instead, implementing Zero Trust network access means continuously authenticating every device, app, and user trying to access the network, encrypting everything on the network, segmenting the network to contain any attacks, establishing policies to limit network access, and identifying threats in real time.

The main concepts of Zero Trust are to continuously authenticate users and devices instead of just once , encrypt everything, provide the minimum access needed and limit access duration, and use segmentation to limit the damage of any breaches. Zero Trust in the cloud encrypts anything stored in the cloud, manages access, helps identify any breaches to cloud infrastructure, and speeds up remediation.

What is Zero Trust architecture? Learn more. How does Zero Trust architecture work? Use least privileged access Limit the amount of information and length of time people can access something, instead of providing access to all company resources indefinitely. Assume breach Segment networks so if someone does get unauthorized access, the damage is contained.

Benefits of using Zero Trust security Businesses that implement Zero Trust architecture enjoy stronger security, support for remote and hybrid work, lower risk, and more time for people to focus on high-priority work instead of tedious tasks. Support remote and hybrid work Help people work securely anytime, anywhere, using any device. Minimize risk Limit damage by preventing attacks, spotting threats faster, and taking action sooner than with traditional security.

Migrate to the cloud Shift from on-premises to the cloud smoothly and reduce vulnerabilities during the process. Organizations need a security model that more effectively adapts to the complexity of the modern work environment. Implementing a Zero Trust model for security helps addresses today’s complex environments. The Zero Trust principles are:. Verify explicitly.

Always authenticate and authorize based on all available data points, including user identity, location, device health, service or workload, data classification, and monitor anomalies. Use least-privileged access. Limit user access with just-in-time and just-enough-access, risk-based adaptive policies, and data protection to help secure data and maintain productivity.

Assume breach. Prevent attackers from obtaining access to minimize potential damage to data and systems. Protect privileged roles, verify end-to-end encryption, use analytics to get visibility, and drive threat detection to improve defenses. Successfully implementing zero-trust requires not only new integrated tools and technologies but also instituting operational policies and authentication requirements that support them.

An example of when this mindset could prevent a cyber incident is within a phishing attempt, where a cybercriminal impersonates a well-trusted source to manipulate an employee to click a malicious link or share sensitive information.

The most effective way to address the challenge of implementing a zero-trust approach is by increasing awareness throughout your workforce with ongoing security training , security highlights in internal communications channels and security or phishing simulations. By making employees more resilient against threats, your organization can significantly minimize damage if an attack occurs and reduce people-focused attacks across the ecosystem. The largest obstacles companies most often face when implementing a zero-trust framework are a lack of data classification and segmentation, budget, availability of resources and expertise.

However, with zero-trust gaining popularity, there are more resources and partners than ever before to help your business implement these security measures. Beyond your tech stack and IT team, one low-cost, high-impact tactic every organization can do today is implementing zero-trust at the employee level. Even if a full-blown, zero-trust architecture is not attainable for your organization today, every step towards a zero-trust security strategy and mindset is a step towards a better security posture.

Jack Koziol is president and founder of Infosec, a leading security awareness and anti-phishing training provider. With years of private vulnerability and exploitation development experience, he has trained members of the U.

His extensive experience also includes delivering security awareness and training for Fortune companies including Microsoft, HP and Citibank.

Cassie is a deputy editor, collaborating with teams around the world while living in the beautiful hills of Kentucky. She is passionate about economic development and is on the board of two non-profit organizations seeking to revitalize her former railroad town.

Select Region. United States. United Kingdom. Governance and Compliance are critical to a strong Zero Trust implementation. Security Posture Assessment and Productivity Optimization are necessary to measure the telemetry throughout the services and systems. The telemetry and analytics feeds into the Threat Protection system. Large amounts of telemetry and analytics enriched by threat intelligent generates high quality risk assessments that can either be manually investigated or automated.

The risk assessment feeds into the policy engine for real-time automated threat protection, and additional manual investigation if needed.

Traffic filtering and segmentation is applied to the evaluation and enforcement from the Zero Trust policy before access is granted to any public or private Network. Data classification, labeling, and encryption should be applied to emails, documents, and structured data.

Access to Apps should be adaptive, whether SaaS or on-premises. Finally, telemetry, analytics, and assessment from the Network, Data, Apps, and Infrastructure are fed back into the Policy Optimization and Threat Protection systems. Discover successful security strategies and valuable lessons learned from CISOs and our top experts. Explore resources for federal agencies to improve national cybersecurity through cloud adoption and Zero Trust. Embrace proactive security with Zero Trust Real-world deployments and attacks are shaping the future of Zero Trust.

Get the white paper. Get the study. Productivity everywhere Empower your users to work more securely anywhere and anytime, on any device. Risk mitigation Close security gaps and minimize risk of lateral movement. Get the Zero Trust Business Plan. Zero Trust principles Verify explicitly Always authenticate and authorize based on all available data points, including user identity, location, device health, service or workload, data classification, and anomalies.

Assume breach Minimize blast radius and segment access. Take the assessment.

Transitioning to modern access architecture with Zero Trust

 
Zero Trust architecture reduces risk across all environments by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to. posture. Keywords architecture; cybersecurity; enterprise; network security; zero trust. Zero Trust and NIST Privacy Framework. We’ve made significant strides in that journey to create chip-to-cloud Zero Trust out of the box. In , we announced secured-core PCs that.