Organizations have implemented Zero Trust as a way to prevent threat actors from accessing endpoints and spreading through the network. A successful Zero Trust strategy involves a few key requirements.
Zero Trust is a fundamental shift in mindset for organizations looking to improve their security. Rather than relying on the premise of detect and remediate in order to stop threats, a Zero Trust approach to security flips the script so that all content, users and applications are considered malicious and treated as such. There is no assumption of good intent.
Organizations that adopt a Zero Trust security posture remove all assumed trust, ensuring that all access and content is authorized and therefore removing latent security holes. While an all encompassing Zero Trust strategy covers all elements within an organization and might seem daunting, breaking up the project into more digestible pieces can enable incremental progress to be made.
A Zero Trust security strategy begins with no access as the default. That means that no user, device or application – regardless of location or status – can access anything. This prevents threat actors from accessing endpoints and spreading through the network.
Assuming that all web and application content is malicious and treating it as such will also prevent potential threats from entering the organization through phishing or other evasive threat techniques.
Zero Trust security provides another level of security checks to ensure that the person, application or device is who or what they say they are. Data such as device information, physical location and, ultimately behavior can be used to ensure authorized and appropriate access.
Rather than differentiating between applications, their locations and their individual clients, modern applications, which are accessible through a browser, can all be accessed in a single location whether they are SaaS or a private application and regardless of the physical location of the application. This makes the end user experience easier and seamless.
There are several key elements to consider when implementing a Zero Trust strategy, including identity, devices, and access.
Identity is king within a Zero Trust architecture. However, adopting a Zero Trust mindset enables security to be enforced beyond the employees of an organization and extend it out to everyone who needs to access resources, whether that is employees, partners, or even customers.
Organizations should look for a solution that not only embraces the tenet of “never trust, always validate” for identity, but also extends that control to encompass applications and data with real-time control and visibility. Neither end of a communication should be trusted, and neither should the data being exchanged.
With the broad, and growing range of devices and operating system variants, organizations need to ensure maximum device coverage to minimize security blindspots and eliminate end user experience issues.
Organizations need to adopt an approach of implementing Zero Trust security with the assumption of deployment being clientless by default. By adopting the browser as the point of access and control, all devices can be included in the Zero Trust efforts.
There are numerous facets to consider regarding access, however the core construct is that all controls need to operate regardless of location.
All applications, wherever they are located, should be secured and accessed by end users from a single web based location.
All users and devices need to be secured in every location. Users inside an office, or traveling the world need to have the same levels of visibility and control enforced. There is no assumption of trust purely because a device is inside the corporate network.
Menlo Security enables organizations to implement Zero Trust across their users, applications and content. Powered by the Elastic Isolation Core™, the Menlo Cloud Security Platform ensures that there is no direct connection between end users and the websites and applications they access.
All users, devices, data and web content is controlled in real time to ensure that: