Zero trust offers significant benefits for the modern remote workforce. It eliminates the vulnerability of firewalls and VPNs and delivers a streamlined login experience while protecting against lateral movement. A robust Zero Trust security strategy requires extended visibility into a complex network and ecosystem of legacy systems, user devices, IOT, cloud workloads, and other applications. This strategy requires risk-based multifactor authentication, identity protection, device and application control, and dynamic threat response.
Adaptive Access
Adaptive access is security that automatically adjusts privileges based on user behavior, device context, and risk levels. This enables organizations to maintain continuous verification, limit the blast radius of attacks, and enable data monitoring. Zero trust uses the principle of “never trust; always verify.” It only allows access to all applications and network resources once a trusted relationship is established between the user and the device. This approach strengthens an organization’s cybersecurity posture without compromising user experience or agility.
With adaptive access, a Duo-powered zero trust platform can assess the risk of users and their devices, ensuring each new request has to prove its identity. This is done by assessing multiple signals, including the type of device, time of day, and user location. This granularity makes it hard for cybercriminals to compromise identities and move laterally in the network. Additionally, it provides a smooth and productive user workflow while enhancing visibility for the security team. This helps ensure compliance with NIST and other government security standards.
Automated Policy Deployment
ZTNA solutions replace the traditional VPN tunnel by verifying users, devices, and applications per session. This approach eliminates the need to connect to a corporate network and enables you to apply granular, adaptive policies aligned with work tasks. ZTNA is defined as products and services that create an identity- and context-based logical access boundary between enterprise applications and end-users through a trusted broker.
These brokers hide resources from discovery and only provide access to specific named applications. This reduces a business’s attack surface and prevents lateral movement by attackers who have gained initial access. Zero trust solutions based on the CARTA model – continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment – require that every user be verified at each access point across all devices, locations, and times. Defending against modern threats such as phishing, malware, and credential theft is critical. It also helps secure BYOD remote access, secure M&A integration, and address the challenges of a deperimeterized environment.
Real-Time Monitoring
Zero trust solutions provide security teams with a granular view of network activity. With this visibility, organizations can see who is accessing what and when from which location. This helps them identify potential threats and take action to mitigate risks. Unlike perimeter-based approaches, ZTNA solutions verify connections in real time and enforce security policies based on the user, device, and application.
This makes it difficult for bad actors to hide in the shadows of a dissolving perimeter. Microsegmentation and least-privilege access also significantly reduce the attack surface. This allows IT teams to keep one step ahead of breaches and improves the break-out time between the first compromised machine and the ability to move laterally across the network. As hybrid work trends have taken hold, employees expect to be able to easily access the applications and data they need from any location. Zero trust solutions make this possible by providing secure, streamlined remote access and eliminating cumbersome virtual desktops prone to security holes. This helps reduce friction for the workforce while improving productivity and efficiency.
Cost-Effectiveness
Many organizations adopt Zero Trust to improve their security posture, minimize the impact of a breach, and support digital transformation initiatives. They often implement several tools, including micro-segmentation, software-defined perimeter technologies, and identity-aware proxies. This requires a significant time investment in infrastructure development and configuration, plus ongoing maintenance to ensure that these systems operate with continuous adaptive trust and adhere to the principle of least privilege.
A Zero Trust solution should be able to monitor network traffic and connected devices, verify user identities through multifactor authentication, flag risky users and their devices, enforce application-specific policies, and encrypt communications with sensitive applications. It should also be able to limit connection privileges, especially for programmatic credentials like service accounts, and detect anomalous behavior. A Zero Trust architecture should also enable businesses to scale their use of the cloud quickly and manage applications without compromising the end-user experience. It should be able to replace VPNs with secure, adaptive access to private cloud applications across managed and unmanaged devices. It should be able to run at the edge of the network, eliminating the need to backhaul data to central servers and improving performance.
Scalability
In business, scalability is the ability of a company to expand without losing quality and consistency. The same principle applies to cybersecurity. Zero trust access solutions offer scalability to accommodate a hybrid work environment’s growing needs while maintaining security. Traditional security models assume that everything inside a network is trusted by default. This approach leaves organizations vulnerable to internal threats, such as compromised accounts with unauthorized access privileges. It also limits users to only the applications they need for their role.
This can be a significant impediment to productivity and workflow. To meet the demands of a modern workplace, organizations need to adopt a Zero Trust model. This requires a new architecture that securely connects employees to applications on both managed and unmanaged devices. To do this, look for a solution that offers granular visibility and reporting to help with compliance. A cloud-delivered solution combines SD-WAN and ZTNA capabilities to provide secure, remote, and least-privileged access.
