Building a Zero Trust Strategy for Your Business

Nowadays, adopting a zero trust strategy has become the standard for many companies and organizations. According to statistics, 72% of organizations all over the world have already either adopted the zero trust approach or are in the process of planning to adopt it. Indeed, the zero trust strategy can be extremely effective against data breaches and cyber-attacks.

What Is a Zero Trust Strategy?

In the context of cybersecurity, a zero trust strategy or policy refers to the approach to security that requires authentication, authorization, and validation continuously to provide access to any specific network, application, data, etc. Essentially, it’s about constantly verifying users instead of assuming that they are authorized and immediately giving them access.One of the biggest reasons why a zero-trust strategy is so commonly used today is that it addresses the most important issues in cybersecurity. Data breaches can no longer be effectively handled by traditional cybersecurity methods where everything that happens internally in the work system is assumed to be trusted. In a zero trust approach, you assume that there can’t be trust both externally and internally.– User Trust

– Users are required to continuously go through authentication to ensure that users, networks, and data are all protected.

– Device Trust – Devices should also be authenticated continuously with access being granted based on real-time risk assessment.

– Network Trust – Instead of macro-segmentation, you will need to transition to micro-segmentation to have more accurate data about who is in your network.

– App Trust – Apps are authorized dynamically rather than statically. In other words, an app is no longer authorized once but has to be authorized continuously.

– Data Trust – Similarly, data is also authorized dynamically while also having better organization and categorization to support this kind of continuous authorization.

What Are the Pillars of a Zero Trust Strategy?

ZTNA_pillars of ZTNA

First, you should understand what the five pillars of a zero trust strategy are to be able to build one yourself:
Understanding and always remembering about these five pillars of a zero trust strategy will help you build a plan for your company that will take into account all aspects of a zero trust approach.

What Are the Challenges of Executing a Zero Trust Strategy?

Nevertheless, there are some challenges that you may come across when building a zero trust strategy for your company:

– Cost and Effort – The first and by far the most obvious problem you may encounter is the cost and effort required to transition to a zero trust strategy. You will need to invest both time and money as well as involve your team in the process. Small companies with limited resources will benefit from involving their entire teams in the brainstorming process to reduce the cost of external specialists.

– Mindset Shift – Everyone in your organization will have to be trained and there will need to be a complete mindset shift for the zero trust strategy to be implemented correctly. From top executives to regular employees, everyone will need to clearly understand why this transition is happening and what it is about. It can be hard to keep all your team members on the same page, so effective and clear communication is essential.

– Complex Infrastructure – Nowadays, many companies have complex infrastructure with some organizations working with data centers that belong to third-party owners. Obviously, a zero trust approach can’t be implemented consistently if your infrastructure is so scattered. You will need to determine how you can simplify this infrastructure and then apply the zero trust approach to it.

Final Thoughts

All in all, building a zero trust strategy in your company will be essential for protecting it from data breaches and cyber-attacks. Use this guide to help you plan and implement your own strategy effectively.

To help you build your own cybersecurity strategy, you can contact a professional agency and use Cloudbric’s ZTNA solutions.