A Comprehensive Review of Zero-Trust Security and Its Benefits

Why adopt a zero-trust approach?

Today’s networks are hostile places, hosting business-critical data, apps, and services,

making them highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. In such a precarious situation, data

breaches are almost inevitable. However, zero trust reduces the likelihood of potential

attacks by malicious threat actors.

Four benefits of zero trust

1. Cuts business and organizational risk

Zero trust presumes all applications and services are malevolent and are forbidden from

communicating until they can be completely confirmed by their identity attributes.

Therefore, it reduces risk as it exposes what’s on the network and how those assets are

communicating. In addition, with the creation of baselines, a zero trust model cuts risk

by removing overwhelmed software and services.

2. Provides control over cloud

Security experts’ biggest apprehensions about moving to and using the cloud are loss of

visibility and access control. Despite growth in cloud service provider (CSP) security,

workload security remains a common obligation between the CSP and the organization

using the cloud. Nonetheless, there is only so much a company can affect inside

someone else’s cloud.‍

Zero trust enables security policies to be based on the individuality of communicating

workloads and are tied straight to the workload itself. In this way, security remains

closest to the assets that need protection and is not impacted by network paradigms

such as IP addresses, ports, and protocols. Consequently, protection not only travels

with the workload where it seeks to communicate but remains unaffected even with the

change of the environment.

3. Helps decrease the risk of a breach

Since the zero-trust model is focused on the workload, security experts find it easier to

recognize and stop malicious activity. A zero-trust method always prevents unconfirmed

workloads from communicating anywhere on the system. Any changed application or

service, whether it’s a result of antagonistic activity, exploitation, or accident, is

automatically unreliable until it can be confirmed again through a set of policies and

controls. Even when substantiated and approved, communication is limited to a “need-

to-know” basis; alternatively, secure access is locked down to only the users, hosts, or

services that need it.

4. Supports compliance initiatives

Zero trust helps accountants and others attain better insight into what data flows the

company has and can see how workloads are secured. It also alleviates the number of

places and ways network communications can be misused, leading to fewer negative

audit results and simpler redress.

Takeaway

It should be understood that zero trust is an approach, not a single technology or even a

process. Designing for zero trust needs security and IT teams to focus on business ideas:

What are we trying to secure, and for whom? It should be recognized that zero trust

reinforces the whole security program; technologies and processes are layered on top of

the plan, not the other way around.