Zero Trust today and tomorrow

Enterprises struggle to maintain their security policies and procedures up to date with the evolution of threats as threat actors become more sophisticated. The complexity of the technological environment widens the attack surface, increasing the potential for broad destruction by hackers.

As a result, Zero trust contributes to eliminating potential network vulnerabilities, reducing the attack surface, faster response times, acquiring control over container and cloud environments, and eventually, improving the security posture.

What is zero trust?

Zero trust architecture is a security method based on the premise that no network element can be trusted. Without express permission, zero trust limits access to users, devices, and applications trying to interact with an architecture; access is constantly validated. Though they have been previously validated or gained access to corporate networks, requests are never trusted by default.

The outdated presumption that everything inside an organization's network perimeter should be entirely trusted was employed by traditional security concepts like the castle and moat. This led to zero trust because, in the lack of granular controls, such faulty trust allowed anyone with network access to move around freely and access sensitive data.

Advantages of zero trust

Zero trust models can reinforce an organization's foundational security and IT practices. The strengths of zero trust are numerous. Robust access policies are made possible by properly segmenting data and resources. Zero trust protects sensitive IPs from unauthorized access by segmenting an organization's network into compartments. Additionally, preventing threats from moving through a network lowers the attack surface.

Organizations are not protected from data leaks, security breaches, and interception by reducing attack surfaces and limiting data access through segmentation if they don't secure their data in transit and storage. As Zero Trust protects data while in storage and transit, organizations can use automatic backups, end-to-end encryption, and hashed data, among other techniques.

Security orchestration ensures that all security tools and procedures sync up smoothly and address all potential points of vulnerability. Finding the optimal configurations that minimize solution conflicts and maximize efficiency can be difficult. The ideal Zero Trust model arranges all components to work harmoniously without any gaps.

Zero trust models secure applications and data by confirming the requester's identity, the circumstances surrounding the request, and the level of risk associated with the access environment before granting access. This can entail limiting resource capability or adding an authentication layer.

The future of zero trust

Zero trust will improve the efficiency of security posture management. As security solutions become more intelligent and IT is given more power, the complexity of setting up and managing rules will decrease. Zero Trust security posture management will assess risks like neglected software patches, configuration drift, and security policy gaps more swiftly and effectively.

Zero-trust principles will influence software and DevOps processes. As time passes, more efficient data protection will be offered by Zero Trust's real-time policy enforcement and security signal verification by contemporary network and application management tools. The ability to build Zero Trust frameworks without needing to modify existing applications would be welcomed by organizations.

The scope of Zero Trust is shifting toward policy unification across security pillars rather than concentrating on protecting pillars individually to offer comprehensive protection and consistent execution of security policies and procedures. Policies will be unified to enable security teams to automate enforcement and improve their cybersecurity posture to encompass more Zero Trust pillars.

Threat actors are increasing, as was already mentioned, and hacking methods are becoming more advanced. Threat intelligence plays a more significant role in the correlation of security signals across pillars. To address this, XDR combined with Zero Trust will assist enterprises in achieving end-to-end visibility, automating reactions to threats, and empowering security teams.