Protecting your business should be a primary focus for all; with advancing cyber security threats and so much important information stored online, the risk of being targeted successfully is one that should be taken extremely seriously. The Zero Trust model looks to ensure maximum safety and offers a modern cyber security approach that protects against the advanced cyber criminals of today.

To understand how it works and how you should be protecting your business, let’s take a look at what ‘zero trust’ is all about.

 

What Is The Zero Trust Model In Cyber Security?

Zero trust is a security framework that assumes each user, device, and attempted access to your network or resources, is not to be automatically trusted. This means that all users, both those within and outside of your organisation, must be re-verified each and every time they are granted access anywhere across your organisation.

 

How Does It Work?

Taking this approach to your cyber security strategy helps to address many of the issues faced by modern businesses who need to be able to secure remote workers, manage a flexible hybrid working environment, and provide secure yet limited access to external customers and clients.

In order to achieve this, a zero trust strategy works by:

 

Continuously Verifying

More traditional cyber security strategies automatically trust users and devices that are already within the organisation, which opens the business to attacks by malicious internal users and anyone who is able to retrieve credentials from staff members.

However, by following the zero trust model, all of your access points require additional verification – under the assumption that every attempt could be malicious. By using Multi-Factor Authentication and effective endpoint security tools across logins and devices, it prevents users from accessing important assets and applications first time, making it much harder for unauthorised users to gain entry, even if they are able to retrieve a password or login details.

 

Providing Real-time Visibility

Preventing and limiting attacks means that your cyber security measures should have constant visibility across the organisation, utilising tools that provide you with analytics and can monitor real-time changes.

Tools like Microsoft Defender For Business, for example, give you comprehensive visibility across your organisation whilst enabling automated detection and investigation of potential threats, allowing any malicious activity to be dealt with rapidly. This kind of visibility and real-time support is so important for modern businesses, who could have hundreds of staff working remotely on hundreds of different devices.

 

Layering Security

A fundamental part of the zero trust model is assuming that a malicious access attempt could come from anywhere, at any stage, requiring a layered security approach that keeps different access points across the business secure.

This means that each of the following should be secured and require a user to re-authenticate before they can gain entry:

  • Identities – individual user accounts and their roles and access levels.
  • Endpoints – all of the devices across your organisation from phones, to laptops, to onsite desktops.
  • Applications – every app sign-in should require a login and should be set up with MFA.
  • Data – all data across the business should be encrypted and should require verification before viewing and access is granted. You should also ensure that least-privilege access permissions are applied so that only those who absolutely need to view certain data, can.
  • Network – access to your network should also be secured and require additional authentication. Just because a user has already accessed a device that is on your network, it does not mean that they should be trusted.

By layering your cyber security in this way, it limits access and lowers the potential damage that can be caused even if a breach is successful. An unauthorised user who gains access to a device may, as a result, fail to access any sensitive information, data, or tools.

 

If you are unsure about whether your business is currently following a zero trust approach to cyber security, or if you’d like to know more about how you modernise your cyber security strategy, our advisors are here to help whenever you need!