How does the zero trust security concept work? What are the functions of this kind of security? And how can your company benefit from this? Find out below.
Zero Trust Security Concept
The concept of zero trust security is a security architecture that creates a boundary between your internal network and the outside world. This concept is an evolution of the traditional network security paradigm. One that assumes you can trust your inside network and you can’t trust the outside world.
Now, if we think about it, this doesn’t make sense. Why would your inside network be less secure than the outside world? This is why we’ve moved to a concept where we don’t assume anything about either side. We simply put up a boundary between them and only allow traffic to pass through that boundary when we’re certain about it.
Moreover, this concept has become more important as businesses have gone digital. This was apparent from the very early days when many companies realized that they had lots of information in digital form. This was easily accessible and could be lost or stolen from the company’s computers.
So, this is considered an improvement over single-trust security. Because it eliminates this risk by allowing employees and partners to access only what they need for their job. but not everything else in your data center or cloud environment.
In addition to protecting your data, there are other benefits:
- You can optimize resources by restricting access to only what employees or partners need
- Then, you can reduce costs by preventing unnecessary use of resources
- You can improve productivity by controlling how employees access IT services
- Next, you can improve security by setting policies on which applications users are allowed to run
- Moreover, you can simplify compliance management with central control over applications and data
- Finally, you can improve reliability by ensuring users access only authorized services
Zero Trust Security Concepts in Depth
There are 4 main elements of zero trust security:
1) Perimeter. In a traditional network, you’re going to have something like a firewall protecting your perimeter. Then, preventing all access from outside sources. Except for those that have been explicitly allowed.
2) Context. If you want flexibility, you must have context-awareness. Context-awareness means that you know who is trying to get into the system and what they need from it.
3) Least privilege. People should have the least amount of privileges necessary to perform their job functions
4) Automation. Humans can’t process all the information coming into a network. Even if they were all dedicated to doing it. And this is why it’s important to have automation in place. This allows your systems to make decisions about how to handle each interaction with your network.
Final Words
As you can see, it is hard to get everything right. You need to balance security with the flexibility and convenience of your users. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up in an environment that is difficult for users to work in and protect. But, if you can strike the right balance, you can create a secure environment that’s also flexible and convenient for your users. And this is where zero trust security comes in.