Zero Trust Security: What Are The Drivers Behind This Approach?

With the changing times, cybercriminals master new techniques to evade the set security controls. Below are some drivers behind the shift to the zero trust network security model.

Network Perimeters Are No Longer Sufficiently Defensible

More people are working from home nowadays while others are allowed to bring their own devices to enterprise premises. Furthermore, using the hybrid cloud as the preeminent enterprise infrastructure platform makes defining the perimeter difficult. Malicious actors could bypass perimeter protections even when enterprises hid digital assets behind a firewall using firewall exceptions and dial-up connections. Today, the challenge has even grown more. Enterprise infrastructure today requires customers, vendors, employees, contractors, and trusted third parties to access the network resources through BYOD devices, the cloud, and other methods.   Fortunately, ZTA flattens the access landscape and ensures secure access to any resources.

Prior Access No Longer Determines Trust Levels

Defenders can revalidate any access decision using the zero trust security approach whenever a user, device, or application requests access. This removes the threat of granting more access than necessary to insiders or employees whose access to a resource needs to change because their job responsibilities have changed. In addition, it protects against changes in affiliations with contractors and other third parties and from applications or devices that must be revalidated whenever they request access.

Ever-Changing Network Security Threats

The other driving force behind this approach is the never-ending escalation of network security threats and cybercriminals that find new ways to exploit networks. Attackers easily break into your perimeter protections and can move laterally through your network with relative ease. A zero trust approach to network security means eliminating the residual trust from the corporate network. This includes the trust granted to the devices, applications, systems, or users that access company restricted resources within the network perimeter or even any access granted to external users of particular systems. 

The principle of explicit verification goes a long way in implementation of this approach. To reduce user session risk, you can implement Azure multi-factor authentication or even use Microsoft Intune to manage your user’s mobile devices. Microsoft Entra ID has many strategies to ensure that no part of your network can be meaningfully exploited, including Entra ID Join, Entra Hybrid Join, and Passwordless solutions such as FIDO 2.0 and MFA.

Zero Trust Security Ensures A Greater Resilience To The Ongoing Attacks

Never trust; always verify. This is the underlying core principle of a zero trust network security strategy. Authentication, authorization, and validation are required for a user, application, or device to gain access. This way, a malicious actor who manages to gain access to the enterprise network will. Based on the Conditional Access policy, a user can only access what they need so that a malicious actor can be neutralized and isolated.

Same Scrutiny Is Accorded To Both Internal And External Threat

There is an increase in the number of users with legitimate reasons for accessing a network. Further, the perimeter is increasingly deprecated by cloud and BYOD devices. This means that designating users internal or external is meaningless. Some attack strategies rely on getting unprivileged access to the network. After getting the access, they pivot to other targets. Hence, the internal threats could be an extension of the external threats. However, internal and external threats are addressed the same in a zero trust security model.