What Are The Pillars Of Zero Trust? How Zero Trust Architecture Works
A Zero Trust security model is exactly what it sounds like: it means trust no one and nothing—whether originating from within or outside of your organization.
While this may seem harsh, a growing number of businesses are adopting zero trust to better safeguard their sensitive information and IT infrastructures against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.
Technological advances are helping to fuel this lucrative criminal enterprise, costing businesses an estimated $400 billion a year in financial losses.
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Bad actors are increasingly using more advanced techniques, including impersonating employees, trusted contacts, and even company officials, to trick an individual into sending money or sharing sensitive information. Cybercriminals can also impersonate devices, apps, and systems.
In fact, more than 80 percent of all cyber attacks involve credentials use or misuse in the network, according to CrowdStrike.
A Zero Trust model works to detect and block these fraudulent attempts to access your network, providing strong defenses against cyber attacks such as a data breach or malware attack.
In this article, we’ll discuss what Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) is and explore the pillars of zero trust.
After reading this article, you will have a thorough understanding of the core components of Zero Trust and how it can significantly improve your organization’s security defenses against a cyber incident.
With this information, you’ll be able to determine if adopting a Zero Trust architecture is right for your business.
What Is Zero Trust Within A Zero Trust Architecture?
First, let’s start by clarifying the terms and the differences between them.
Zero Trust (ZT) is the cybersecurity model that’s based on the notion that nothing can be trusted. It assumes that a breach has already happened or is about to happen. That’s why Zero Trust follows the guiding principle to “never trust, always verify.”
Zero Trust abandons the traditional practice of relying on implicit trust, which allows access and verifies later.
Instead, it follows the information security concept of principle of least privilege (PoLP), which restricts access by granting permission to only the bare minimum needed for a user to complete a task.
Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) is the combination of existing plans and policies, security tools, and IT personnel an organization has in place to ensure that it adheres to the Zero Trust principles.
Put simply, ZTA is essentially the security blueprint for businesses to follow across their entire IT perimeter to enforce Zero Trust standards.
ZTA uses a variety of robust security tools, including: multi-factor authentication (MFA), real-time monitoring, data encryption, micro-segmentation, and identity and access management (IAM).
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What Are The Pillars Of Zero Trust?
The concept and practice of zero trust principles is nothing new and has been around even before the term was coined.
ZT is designed to prevent security incidents such as data breaches and cybersecurity attacks by restricting lateral movement within your IT infrastructure.
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Federal agencies have used and pushed for the adoption of Zero Trust pillars for more than a decade. Businesses with certain government contracts are even required to implement Zero Trust as a condition of their contract award.
These core pillars are derived from the Zero Trust Maturity Model (version 2.0) of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
They are also outlined in two NIST publications: NIST SP 800-207 and NIST SP 800-207A (for cloud-native applications in multi-cloud environments, and referenced in the Department of Defense’s Zero Trust Reference Architecture.
The 5 core pillars of Zero Trust:
1. Identity
Identify human and non-human users and establish access controls to verify their identity before allowing access to your IT network.
With Zero Trust, a user can be anything or anyone that is trying to access your network. That means that a user can be an employee, device, vendor, contractor, application, or another network.
With Zero Trust, each device or application is held within its own security perimeter, and it is only allowed strictly necessary communication with parts of your IT systems.
Zero Trust blocks access until a user—be it a person, device, app, or system—can be verified. It then requires continual re-authentication to maintain access.
By verifying each access attempt and then allowing only least-privilege access after verification, Zero Trust helps you mitigate the chances of a cyber incident or data breach.
Use case examples of identity within Zero Trust:
- Employees (on-prem or remote) opening a file or application from their home computer
- Staff accessing popular cloud-based applications, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Gmail, connected to your network
- Smartphones, smartwatches, smart speakers, activity trackers, and other internet of things (IoT) devices being used to access apps or files on your network
- Third-party vendors accessing customer information stored on your network
2. Devices
Conduct a complete inventory of your entire IT environment and assets, including their configurations. In doing so, you can assess how secure your endpoints really are.
This will enable you to find and remediate any hidden vulnerabilities to prevent bad actors from exploiting a security weakness to gain a foothold into your network.
Zero Trust is designed to improve network security by increasing visibility into your IT systems. This means that even devices connected to your network that are offline can be detected and identified.
Your IT team or managed IT service provider (MSP) can use ZT technology to keep a watchful eye on your network and rapidly quarantine or block suspicious activity at the endpoint to prevent further intrusion.
Devices can include:
- desktops
- laptops
- printers
- servers
- mobile devices
- internet of things (IoT) devices
- networking equipment
- bring-your-own-device (BYOD) personal devices used for work
3. Networks
ZT calls for organizations to split their systems into different sections, each with its own virtual door and access key.
This strategy, called microsegmentation, helps prevent unauthorized access so organizations can maintain the security of their network and IT infrastructure.
The way microsegmentation works is by essentially splitting network access between workloads.
For example, a hospital using Zero Trust microsegmentation can cordon off its highly sensitive patient information within an application and grant access only to authorized personnel.
4. Applications and workloads
Zero Trust verifies the identity and security of your software applications and their workloads, whether being accessed on-prem or in the cloud.
Users (including apps and their functions) must pass identification checks before being granted least privilege access, depending on the job. This helps control traffic across your network.
5. Data
Safeguarding your sensitive information and proprietary business data is the cornerstone of Zero Trust.
Any user attempting to access data on your network must be verified, regardless of how or from where it’s being accessed.
This core pillar of Zero Trust requires that data be categorized within your IT systems, including figuring out where and how the data should be stored.
Once this is done, businesses can then segment the data to restrict access on a need-to-know basis.
What’s The Bottom Line With A Zero Trust Model?
After reading this article, you now have a thorough understanding of the core pillars of Zero Trust within a Zero Trust architecture.
While Zero Trust is not the right solution for every business, it does offer among the most robust protections available to safeguard your data, systems, and network from a cyber incident.
If you believe the benefits of Zero Trust could help your business and you already have the internal IT staff with the knowledge, resources, and time to devote to planning and implementing a comprehensive ZTA strategy, then you may not need external IT help.
If that’s not the case, and you’re considering using an MSP, we encourage you to do your due diligence to research and evaluate several providers to ensure they can meet your IT needs.
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