The Benefits of Zero Trust Network Access for Modern Businesses

Zero Trust is a security framework that follows the mantra, Never trust, always verify. This approach gives companies visibility into legacy and contemporary resources to prevent breaches before they occur and flags suspicious behavior based on user, device, and application access requests.

It secures the three primary elements of today’s workforce: users, devices, and applications. This approach is a better solution than traditional network security solutions like VPNs, which have become obsolete with the rise of remote work environments.

Zero Trust Improved Security

Zero Trust operates on a simple principle: Never trust, always verify. It treats every user and device inside the company network or a mobile app on their phone as untrusted until proven otherwise. Continuous identity validation and application access based on the least privilege ensure that only the right people are getting to the right apps at the right time with the most appropriate level of security.

Zero Trust helps organizations close security gaps and control the lateral movement of malware to cloud, hybrid, and on-premises applications. It also improves the user experience for a global, remote workforce by simplifying how they interact with critical business applications.

However, moving to Zero Trust can require a significant up-front investment of resources and the adoption of new technologies. This may create a resource bottleneck and slow adoption. However, a trusted MSP can assess your security position and identify the technology, tools, and processes your organization needs to implement Zero Trust. Once implemented, Zero Trust can reduce your attack surface by allowing users to connect directly to applications, eliminating the need for a network perimeter.

Better Visibility

A zero-trust architecture is built with multilayered security technologies that take a granular approach to network access. These ZTNA solutions include software-defined perimeters, identity-aware proxies, and device approval systems. When an access request is made, the system verifies that it meets strict criteria and that the user and device are trusted. This helps limit the “blast radius” of a breach and ensures that only the most secure resources are available to users, keeping them safe from internal and external threats.

Unlike traditional approaches to security, Zero Trust is a policy-based model that prioritizes the device and user context above all else. It is also agnostic about the environment where a workload communicates, protecting it from threat actors in public and hybrid cloud environments, distributed data centers, and more.

This flexibility allows organizations to scale their zero-trust infrastructure in a phased manner and start with their most critical or noncritical assets that can be used as test beds for the security framework. As a result, IT teams can quickly achieve an ROI on their Zero Trust investment and begin to focus their time and resources on other business-critical projects.

Reduced Risk

Your attack surface will be significantly smaller if you prevent all applications from interacting with one another until the identity system and a specific device have verified them. This is because it limits the “blast radius” of a potential breach, making it far less likely that a malicious actor will succeed in gaining unauthorized access to your most sensitive data.

Zero Trust requires significant time, effort, and resources to develop and deploy. This includes financial resources to invest in the technologies needed and human resources to oversee and manage the required new processes and procedures.

Additionally, ongoing monitoring of users and devices must be implemented to ensure policies are followed, suspicious activity is flagged, and anomalies are detected and escalated promptly. This level of visibility and control is made possible by Zero Trust architectures. They provide a way to increase security without sacrificing performance and productivity for your workforce. This enables organizations to deliver on their security and business goals while defending against today’s threats.

Increased Efficiency

As the world of work changes, it’s critical to have security solutions that can keep pace. Zero Trust is an approach that eliminates the need for complex firewall configurations and VPN systems to manage remote access and ensures all users, devices, and applications are always verified based on context, not just location and identity.

The goal of Zero Trust is to assume all networks, devices, and users are hostile until they’re proven safe, eliminating the need for a network perimeter. Continuous verification allows all access to be verified based on device, user, application, data source, and other context. This helps limit the “blast radius” of a breach, which reduces the impact if a threat does get past defenses.

Additionally, Zero Trust utilizes micro-segmentation and granular policy controls to ensure that all users are given only the resources required to do their jobs. This minimizes risk and reduces the workload of SOC analysts. It also provides a legible audit trail, improving compliance and incident response speed and efficiency. This can help cut security costs and accelerate your digital transformation.

Secure Your Future

The Zero Trust model is the best way to secure today’s digital work. It eliminates the need for perimeter-based security based on identity that follows users, devices, and applications, protecting them wherever they are—inside or outside the network.

Ensures a robust, end-to-end approach to security with continuous verification and strict authentication. This prevents breaches from exploiting implicit trust through a single validation point, such as a firewall or user login. Instead, attackers can be stopped before reaching critical data or environments.

Enforces accurate least privilege per-request access decisions in information systems and services based on data sources, user identity, device security posture, application context, etc. This reduces a breach’s “blast radius” by limiting access and ensuring that all assets are protected, even after a compromise.

Provides visibility into all access across the entire network. This includes identifying and protecting all non-IT resources, like building security, IOT, and environmental systems, from attacks that target them as a way into your corporate data.