Cybersecurity professionals have approached their work with a specific focus on network perimeter in recent years. The idea of a Zero Trust-IT environment emerged and is one in which data, endpoints, and systems are protected by limiting access to them.

Zero Trust isn’t a product or service but an approach to cybersecurity which means – “never trust and always verify.” The ongoing cyber-attacks describe why agencies must prefer a zero-trust architecture for IT security, where nothing inside or outside the network perimeter is automatically trusted.

Organizations need to be proactive in verifying everything before granting access. It is essential to establish a secure environment to keep your business running.

“Check out our security and compliance services at vTech Solution, Inc., to learn how we can assist you in creating a secure IT environment for your organization.”

What makes it the right time for Zero Trust in cybersecurity?

Security issues are getting even more complicated, since some data and applications are on-premise and some are in the cloud, and everyone (employees to partners!) is accessing those applications using a variety of devices even from multiple locations. Concurrently, government and industry regulations are increasing the necessity to safeguard important data.

Since the coronavirus outbreak, most of the offices have been shut down as a preventive measure to check the COVID-19 spread. Work from home is the only option left with organizations to cope up with the situation. Hence, remote work has become a highly popular and common practice around the world. This makes the organization’s sensitive data more vulnerable to hackers over the world wide web.

Realizing that existing methods aren’t doing enough, business heads are trying to find something more trustworthy – and are observing that the Zero Trust model can produce great results.

Getting Started with Zero Trust in IT:

Achieving Zero Trust is often regarded as expensive and complicated. First things first, building a zero-trust environment doesn’t mean constructing up a whole new technology architecture. It’s engineered upon the already existing design and doesn’t need you to tear down and replace the technology which is already existent. Zero Trust is quite easy to deploy, implement, and maintain using this step-by-step approach.

1. Identify the protect surface: – Creative Zero Trust environment consists of protected surfaces. After determining the protected surface, one will move their controls as near as attainable, enabling them to create a micro-perimeter with policy statements that are compact, accurate and graspable.

2. Map the transaction flows: – In order to determine how the traffic flowing across a network should be guarded, you need to gain a contextual understanding of the interdependencies of your DaaS. Record how particular resources interact allows you to properly enforce controls and provides valuable context to help ensure optimal cybersecurity with minimal disruption to users and business operations.

3. Architect your Zero Trust-IT network: – After completing the above two points, you can map out the zero-trust architecture, beginning with a next-generation firewall that acts as a segmentation gateway which makes a micro-perimeter round the protected surface. This firewall will ensure to add up multiple layers of examination for anything attempting to access resources within the protected surface.

4. Create your Zero Trust policy:- You need to get a clear idea of your users, the applications they tend to access, why they need the access, how they tend to connect to those applications, and what controls can be used to protect that access, in order to lay down these policies. This multi-level policy enforcement ensures only known allowed traffic or authorized application is granted access.

5. Monitor and Maintain: – The final step includes analyzing all logs, internal and external and focusing on the operational aspects of zero trust. Since it is a repetitive process, inspecting and logging all traffic will provide valuable insights into how to improve the network over time.

Zero Trust requires continuous visibility, compliance, and control which can be provided directly to the device or through the cloud. A software-defined perimeter provides secure user access and prevents data loss, regardless of where the users are, which devices are being used, or where your workloads and data are hosted.

Workloads are highly complex and travel through several data centers and private, public and hybrid clouds. With Zero Trust, you need to have deep visibility into the activity and interdependencies across users, devices, networks, applications, and data. Segmentation gateways track traffic, avoid threats, and implement multi-layered security access in your on-site data center and multi-cloud environments across north-south and east-west traffic.

There’s never been a better time than now to implement zero-trust security models. When state and local governments moved their workforces to home offices in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the IT security environment changed dramatically. No longer could agencies maintain the security of their organizational data over the network.

The evolved technologies, the established protocols and standards, and the necessity for a new approach to security cannot be ignored. The companies can adopt the zero-trust model as part of their overall plan for digital transformation, adopting the technology that can help them achieve zero trusts as they push further into the cloud and thereby remove old methods of legacy.

At vTech Solution, Inc., we can help you set up a secure IT environment to protect your information and physical resources. Let’s discuss what works best for your organization.