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Mira Aslanova

By: Mira Aslanova on January 21, 2025

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Why Are Businesses Moving To Zero Trust? Your Roadmap To A ZT Strategy

Cybersecurity | Managed Services | Compliance

The rising incidence of cyber threats has businesses on alert.

Many organizations today are searching for ways to safeguard their sensitive employee and customer data, proprietary business information, and their IT systems from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

Because of this, there has been a rising trend in businesses adopting a Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) to mitigate cyberattacks.

An estimated 61 percent of organizations worldwide said they have a defined Zero Trust initiative in place, more than doubling the implementation rate over two years, according to Okta’s The State of Zero Trust Security report.

The report also revealed that another 35 percent of businesses said they planned to implement a ZTA soon.     

So, why are companies moving to Zero Trust? 

In this article, we’ll explore the business benefits of Zero Trust and identify 5 steps to implement a Zero Trust architecture within your organization.

After reading this article, you’ll have a thorough understanding of what Zero Trust architecture is and how it can help you future-proof your business.

What Is Zero Trust Architecture?

Zero Trust is a security approach based on the idea that no one and nothing should be automatically trusted, whether originating from inside or outside your network.

Every person, device, and system must be verified before getting access.

While it might seem like an extra step for users and employees at your organization, it's one of the best ways to protect your business data.

Zero Trust works by continuously monitoring traffic across your network and blocking access until the identity of an individual, application, or system can be confirmed.

Users must then continue to prove their identity in order to maintain access.


Related Article: What Are The Pillars Of Zero Trust? How Zero Trust Architecture Works


Zero Trust architecture is the stack of robust security solutions, practices, and policies implemented to follow the Zero Trust pillars.

It can be compared to a highly secure building where only certain employees can access specific parts of the building, but only after providing more than one proof of identification, such as facial recognition, fingerprints, or a security token. 

Ideally, Zero Trust architecture should be applied to every part of your organization’s IT footprint to establish as strong a defense as possible against cyber incidents.

What Are The Business Advantages of Adopting A Zero Trust Architecture?

A growing number of companies are migrating to a Zero Trust architecture because of the many business benefits of Zero Trust. Here are 8 top ways it can help your business:

1. Strengthens your security posture

Provides a suite of powerful, centralized tools that can automatically identify users, establish access controls, detect abnormalities, quarantine and evaluate suspicious activity at the endpoints, and remediate confirmed cyber threats.

These advanced solutions can include real-time monitoring, automated detection and response, multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection, data encryption, microsegmentation, and privileged access management (PAM).

These security resources work together to protect your data, devices, and systems from a potential data breach or cyberattack.

2. Offers increased visibility

ZTA reduces security risks by providing a critical window into your IT systems. All network-connected devices, data, apps, and systems are monitored and assessed, whether on-prem or in the cloud.

This deep visibility increases your network security by allowing you to closely monitor network traffic for anomalies and potential threats. 

By tracking such data as the number of failed attempts from one device, for instance, this can help you quickly identify and respond to malicious actors. It can also reinforce user verification to minimize false alerts.

3. Improves agility

Automated security tools can quickly detect and respond to cyber threats.

Any unusual traffic patterns or suspicious activity is automatically isolated, evaluated, and then remediated as needed. 

4. Boosts productivity

Allows employees, vendors, and other users to safely access data, apps, and systems, minimizing downtime.

This ensures that all devices, data, applications, and other parts of your network are available to the right people, whether they are in the office, working from home in a remote or hybrid setup, or accessing your network from some other location.

5. Safeguards sensitive personal and business data

By constantly authenticating users, it helps keep your employee and customer personally identifiable information (PII), proprietary business information, and other sensitive data out of the hands of malicious actors through a data breach, malware attack, or other cyber incident.


Related Article: What Is Business Email Compromise? How To Spot And Avoid Its Traps


6. Proactively meets compliance requirements

Since ZTA requires business to implement a variety of strong security controls to cover every aspect of their IT environment, implementing those security measures will satisfy a number of different security and privacy regulatory requirements.

Zero Trust lays the foundation for compliance with certain regulations like NIST and CMMC, especially in industries where protecting Federal Contract Information (FCI) and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) are top priorities.


Related Article: What Are The Pillars Of Zero Trust? How Zero Trust Architecture Works


7. Reduces costs

A ZTA strategy can help reduce costs by securing your IT environment from the significant damages that can result from a data breach or cyberattack, such as financial loss, customer defections, reputational damage, and legal issues.

It can also save money by streamlining security measures using a centralized platform.

8. Provides a competitive advantage

Technology modernization can give businesses a competitive edge, helping them to mitigate risk, quickly adjust to market changes, and take advantage of future opportunities.

What Are The ZTA Standards?

A Roadmap to ZTA Implementation

The ZTA standards incorporate the five core Zero Trust pillars: identity, devices, networks, applications & workloads, and data. It also covers automation & orchestration and visibility & analytics.

A comprehensive ZTA security strategy will involve everything within your IT infrastructure. Careful planning, implementation, and training—following best practices—will be critical to the success of your ZTA initiative.

5 steps to implement Zero Trust: 

1. Identify your assets:
  • Conduct an organization-wide audit of all aspects of your IT environment, whether on premises, in the cloud, or hybrid.

  • These assets include employees, contractors, vendors, workstations, laptops, networking equipment, communications equipment, cloud-based applications, workloads, and data.

  • Your inventory should detail all of your physical and digital assets, their exact locations, and their configurations. It should also spell out how and from where each asset accesses your network.
2. Create a written log
  • Create a detailed log of all of the identified users, equipment, and digital assets on your network and share it with key stakeholders.

  • Keeping a record of your assets, access, and control points will allow you to prioritize your assets that need the most protection. 
3. Implement strong identity and access management (IAM)
  • A cornerstone of Zero Trust is the guiding principle of “never trust, always verify.” It follows the belief that a breach has happened or is about to happen. So, strong identity verification tools are an essential part of an effective Zero Trust strategy.

  • These tools will validate all employees, devices, apps, and systems before allowing access. It then requires users to constantly re-verify their identities to maintain access.

  • Examples of powerful IAM tools include: multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), biometrics, tokens, and unique passwords.

  • Since Zero Trust views all users as untrusted adversaries, it uses a combination of verification resources like device certificates and trusted platform modules (TPMs) to check the identity, health, and safety of a device before granting permissions.
 4. Perform a gap analysis
  • Conduct a gap analysis to compare the specific regulatory requirements you need to meet against your existing security measures.

  • Your gap analysis will enable you to determine what your current security measures are and help you pinpoint any vulnerabilities or security gaps that are out of compliance.

  • A gap analysis provides a baseline for your security posture, so that you know the  security measures you still need to implement to minimize risk and meet the requirements of the targeted regulation.

Related Article: How to Perform a CMMC Gap Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide to Compliance


5. Ensure governance and risk management
  • In a Zero Trust architecture, governance refers to the complex web of security tools, personnel, policies, and procedures you put in place to strictly follow the Zero Trust philosophy.

  • Adopting robust security solutions that use automated technology, such as machine learning, can provide 24/7 real-time visibility into your IT environment.

  • It works to continuously scan your network for suspicious activity, analyze data, and constantly verify user identities, device health, and access requests to mitigate security risks to your business.

  • Implement least privilege access, a main component of Zero Trust, to only give the minimal level of access needed for verified users to do a job.

  • Use microsegmentation to separate different parts of your IT systems to limit lateral movement within your network.

What’s The Bottom Line With Adopting Zero Trust For Businesses?

As we’ve shown, Zero Trust touches every corner of your organization, both human and technical. It uses advanced security solutions to ensure that your organization can effectively minimize cyber threats.

Zero Trust architecture helps businesses mitigate risks by constantly checking and evaluating their IT infrastructure for red flags.

By establishing a strong security posture with ZTA, businesses can help reduce the chances of a data breach or financial loss caused by a cyberattack.

We provide articles like this to help keep you up-to-date about important technology-related issues that can help you make informed decisions about IT investments and solutions that can help protect your business and provide a business advantage.

If you already have the in-house staff with the expertise, resources, and time to implement Zero Trust strategies, then you may not need external support from a managed IT provider.

Unsure if your business would benefit from using external IT support, check out 10 Reasons For SMBs To Hire A Managed IT Services Provider.

Want to learn more about the benefits of managed IT, read Managed IT Services: What’s Your True ROI?

Or, if you’d prefer to speak to a human, click the button and one of our IT professionals will quickly follow up to learn more about your IT needs.

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About Mira Aslanova

Mira Aslanova is the Cybersecurity and Compliance Manager at Kelser Corp. Her mission is to protect businesses from evolving threats while ensuring adherence to relevant compliance regulations and policies. With extensive experience managing cybersecurity for complex systems, she has helped organizations secure the certifications and approvals required for safe and secure operations. Her expertise makes her a trusted partner in navigating the challenges of cybersecurity and compliance.

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