What is Zero Trust Security? Explained

Global business is becoming more digital, and a greater number of workloads, applications, and data are migrating to the cloud. Access to corporate applications and data is required by remote users and international business partners, making it more difficult for security teams to establish a perimeter. Assuming that the threat always existed outside of the network and that the stronger your castle wall was, the more impenetrable you were, businesses historically spent extensively on perimeter defensive solutions. However, because of the change to digital, remote, and international access, businesses frequently require more than simple perimeter security measures. This is where Zero Trust security makes itself known.. Evidence of its importance is reflected in the recent increase in breached confidential files and records. 

What is Zero Trust and how can we Defend Ourselves Against Sophisticated Threats?

The most popular way to address security flaws has been to add more products at various network tiers. This classic band-aid technique, however, is ineffective; multiple-point products create blind spots and widen the attack surface. To defend against current and complex attacks, a paradigm shift in security is required.

Before granting access to apps and data, businesses must authenticate and authorize every user and device inside and outside the perimeter. In contrast to traditional security approaches, which “trust” anything inside the network, this micro-level perimeter control. The zero-trust structure is based on least privilege access, which prevents any lateral movement, whether deliberate or unintentional.

Zero Trust Micro-segmentation uses the basic tenets of micro-segmentation to establish security by starting with data. This method improves security by using obfuscation techniques, restricts the blast radius of the attack, and speeds up incident response and remediation. To achieve the zero trust, the framework should include workload, network, devices, people, and data monitoring, as well as policy automation and orchestration tailored for multi-cloud and bare-metal servers.

The First Step to Zero Trust Security is Micro-Segmentation

A technique for rationally creating network segments and carefully controlling the traffic both inside and between the segments is micro-segmentation. It limits the spread of lateral threats in the data center and offers the ability to regulate workloads in a data center and a multi-cloud architecture with granular policy controls. Historically, network firewalls and VLAN ACLs have been used to implement segmentation with static IP addresses and subnets. Therefore, network segmentation is not a new idea. However, this is the strategy has drawbacks and restrictions, such as the inability to separate and secure cloud workloads.

Fortunately, software-defined micro-segmentation has emerged, enabling host-level granular segmentation. In hybrid multi-cloud settings, segmenting workloads is also possible thanks to a software-defined framework, allowing security teams to maintain a constant security posture throughout the network.

Organizations may implement zero-trust security throughout their security infrastructure regardless of whether the workloads or apps are in the data center or the cloud thanks to this unheard-of capability to set security policies at a specific, host level.

Using Zero-Trust Architecture for More Secure Access

Never trust and constantly verify first is one of a zero-trust approach’s main tenets. Security teams can isolate environments and divide distributed workloads and apps using micro-segmentation at the host level. After segmenting, a zero-trust strategy can be used to apply fine-grained security controls.

High-level policies can even be developed based on real-world constructs like user groups, access groups, and network organizations with the correct micro-segmentation solution and applied to various applications. With classical segmentation, applying consistent policies was nearly difficult in a dynamic VM environment. Only authorized users can access a program that uses software-defined micro-segmentation since it is hidden.

Using zero-trust architecture for more secure access

Never trust and constantly verify first is one of a zero-trust approach’s main tenets. Security teams can isolate environments and divide distributed workloads and apps using micro-segmentation at the host level. After segmenting, a zero-trust strategy can be used to apply fine-grained security controls. High-level policies can even be developed based on real-world constructs like user groups, access groups. And network organizations with the correct micro-segmentation solution and applied to various applications. With classical segmentation, applying consistent policies was nearly difficult in a dynamic VM environment.

Only authorized users can access a program that uses software-defined micro-segmentation since it is hidden. In order to prevent lateral migration and unauthorized access. Any connection that cannot be confirmed by the policy criteria is denied, and it is then promptly identified for investigation and rehabilitation. This minimizes the attack surface and creates a zero-trust security micro fence around apps that is so beneficial for security.