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.
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.
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:
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.
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.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.
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.
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
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
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.
Technology modernization can give businesses a competitive edge, helping them to mitigate risk, quickly adjust to market changes, and take advantage of future opportunities.
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.
Related Article: How to Perform a CMMC Gap Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide to Compliance
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?
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