Are You Ready for Zero Trust?

Zero Trust networking has become a popular solution for moving beyond perimeter-based network security for organizations - for both private sector and government offices. The concept behind traditional perimeter-based security is to emulate the traditional office paradigm. It presumed that anyone and anything inside of the perimeter was by default ‘trusted’. This led to the rise of the Virtual Private Network (VPN) which extended the physical office to an endpoint through a ‘secure’ connection. As the cybersecurity landscape has evolved, so has our thinking about the assumed or presumed level of security inside of an office, especially for large, distributed organizations where such assumptions are often invalid.

Zero Trust architecture can build a solid foundation for stopping attackers looking to exploit this presumed internal security model, as well as tracking and reporting activity across the network. While NIST provides an approachable standard for Zero Trust implementation, the reality is that implementing Zero Trust for most enterprises is a significant challenge because of the existing complexity of their environments. It often requires not only a significant investment in network reconfiguration and new technology, but also a complete overhaul in the way users access various essential services, which can create a massive disruption to productivity, operations and business continuity.

That’s why it’s critical to work directly with a cybersecurity design and implementation partner to devise and deploy a Zero Trust strategy that makes sense for your organization. By starting with a full understanding of your environment, your business needs and objectives, and your operations, you can create a more secure, stable environment without disrupting—or destroying—your business operations.

To determine if your organization is ready to dive into Zero Trust networking, start by asking yourself these four questions.

1. Do you have a clear scope?

Start by clarifying where you want to implement Zero Trust. What exactly are your priorities and where do you draw the boundaries? What technologies or infrastructure pieces are out of scope? Having a clear answer to these fundamental questions can help you choose the right approach to deliver on those goals, select the right vendor and plan your deployment strategy.

Do you have a comprehensive picture of what’s in that scope? In order to effectively begin a transition to zero trust, you first need to understand how the people, processes, and technologies in the target environment interact. Realistically, this can be a monumental task that often causes paralysis—companies don’t know where to begin, so they never do. That’s why having a trusted security partner with experience in organizing this information to help your organization navigate this inventory and assessment is a vital first step.

2. Will your network architecture support Zero Trust?

Every component in your network must be able to talk to the policy engine and enable monitoring/observation of all traffic at all times. Some legacy systems may not support this kind of real-time requirement, and you’ll need to decide whether to exclude them from the Zero Trust policy, isolate them on a special subnet with different controls, or decide it’s better to retire some systems in favor of newer, more compatible solutions.

3. Are you prepared for the impact on your daily operations?

Any large organizational change like moving to Zero Trust will have a demonstrable impact on your People, Processes, and Technology. For example, each of your administrators and admin-level services rely on privileges and permissions to conduct their daily work and operations. That might mean accessing multiple services or running automatic scripts that currently rely on single sign-on or shared trust. Changing to a Zero Trust infrastructure will impact all those permissions, functionality and automated processes, and a single forgotten admin account can disrupt operations when you start to migrate over to Zero Trust. That’s why a careful inventory of assets, integrations, identity, and access management is essential before getting started. The last thing you want is to shut down your systems or force admins to leverage back-door direct access through VPN, essentially undermining the entire premise of your Zero Trust initiative.

4. How will you select the right solution?

There are plenty of third-party Zero Trust solutions on the market, but each has its own unique solution set. They all function slightly differently, and they all may not be appropriate or effective for your specific architecture. An experienced partner can help you choose the right solution for your environment based on our deep implementation experience. We know what works and how best to integrate it, which can significantly smooth the transition.

For example, in a traditional network environment with a core office and satellite facilities, one of the best solutions for Zero Trust is a cloud-based control plane that provide policy enforcement and administration to ensure availability across all locations. Obviously, this structure also routes validation traffic through the internet, so extra measures need to be taken to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, availability, and audit-ability of the communications between individual hosts and the cloud policy engine. This is where an experienced partner can help design a more secure architecture and provide suggestions on which third party solution(s) fit your infrastructure best.