It is essential to understand how a zero trust model can positively impact your enterprise data security. The model can reduce application and service vulnerabilities for several organisations.
It can even showcase many other business benefits that can include:
- Improving data visibility and reducing the risk of asset discovery
- Greater control of the cloud environment
- Reduced risk of breach potential
- Assistance in compliance audits
- Increase in speed and agility
- Less organisational friction
For some companies, the move to a zero trust network mindset is a significant investment. But these benefits can pay off in the long run.
It will not only ensure that your network is less at risk of infiltration but open up several other benefits to your business outside of data security.
Is this the right option for your business needs? Keep reading to learn more.
1. Improving Data Visibility and Reducing the Risk of Asset Discovery
Something that can leave organisations open to risk is knowing precisely what data they own, where it gets stored on the server, and how it travels across the network.
When it comes to zero trust network access, any applications or services that attempt to interact with the network needs identification and is always assumed untrustworthy. Until it is verified through an identity and access management system, it will not be able to communicate with the network.
Security, IT, and networking teams will then have a better understanding of what is on the system and what's trying to access it. It also allows these teams better visibility into the network, and it's associated risks by using data flow maps.
2. Greater Control of the Cloud Environment
Security teams have many fears of moving to the cloud.
Given data is being created and stored at many locations, companies tend to lose visibility and control of who is accessing that data and how the data gets managed. Zero trust services are agnostic to the underlying infrastructure. Such services only allow authenticated user devices to access the relevant resources, and only if they are & authorised to do so.
Zero trust is an application workload centric model. This gives security teams greater control over the workload. This method also makes it difficult for hackers. Any time a workload fails verification, it isn't granted secure access to the network.
3. Reduced Risk of Security Breach Potential
Another benefit of the zero trust model being workload reliant is that it's much easier for security teams to identify and stop any malicious behaviour.
A zero trust security network is constantly inspecting workloads. It's looking for deviations from its intended state. With such a model in place, one can prevent any unverified orders from communicating anywhere on the system.
The service, if set up right, will automatically deem them to be untrustworthy. Whatever seems like an anomaly or a discrepancy will then need to get verified through a series of policies and controls. Even after access is authorised, its access gets limited to users who need to use the data.
4. Assistance in Compliance Audits
Data security systems must meet not only the requirements of IT teams and users but also compliance auditors. zero trust produces clear data flows for the organisation. It also illustrates how workloads communicate with the network.
This can make the auditor's job a lot easier to demonstrate how secure the enterprise's systems are.
The model decreases the number of places and ways the network can get exploited. This, in turn, reduces the volume of audit findings. It also means fewer remediation actions for IT and security teams.
5. Increase in Speed and Agility
In today's business world, speed matters.
When a network gets breached, disruptions can occur that result in shutting down ports. Services are also limited until everything can return to normal. Due to the way a zero trust network is structured, applications and services can stay operational even when a disruption gets detected.
The workload that's travelling across the network is constantly getting assessed. It can be isolated if an abnormality becomes found. This allows users to continue using the system at normal speeds while the affected workload is being dealt with.
6. Less Organisational Friction
In some organisations, DevOps and security teams can clash over the release of software and updates. Compromises have been made over the years. But they have resulted in extra manual intervention before anything can go live.
A zero trust model has demonstrated that this process can be sped up to allow for rapid deployment. This is because every application is allocated an identifier that requires verification. Provided there are no changes to it, then it is able to receive updates and changes.
This brings several business opportunities. For one, it can speed up production on releases and updates. This isn't normally possible with more traditional security models.
Is The Zero Trust Model Best for Your Enterprise?
The zero trust model doesn't only protect the company's resources and data. It can also bring several benefits to the organisation that other frameworks can't.
Does your enterprise want to focus on any of the following?
- Reducing time to breach detection
- Reducing complexities of security stacks
- Minimising the impacts of security skill shortages
- Protecting customer information to avoid reputation and financial damage
If your answer is yes, then the zero trust model seems like it would be the right fit.
How to Get Started
With remote working becoming the norm rather than the exception, it is even more important to secure your customer information and network environment.
Securing access for all users of a company can assist in responding to incidents faster and reduce disrupting day to day operations. Oxortis provides several service plans to keep your access architecture secure by utilising PulseSecure's new zero trust platform.
To understand how Oxortis and PulseSecure can work with your enterprise, get in touch with the team today. That way, you can get a full understanding of the range of services on offer.