When Work Has No Boundaries, Is Zero-Trust the Right Answer?

Today, we work in what can rightfully be called “perimeter-less enterprises.” Most workers can access business data and resources without any constraints that might once have been in place- such as time of day, location, or operating system. Unfortunately, operating in such an environment substantially increases potential security risks. Since traditional security models have not mitigated sophisticated cybersecurity threats, organizations need to adopt a different approach – and many now adopt a zero trust approach.

What does a zero trust approach (ZTA) imply?

The Zero Trust Approach is based on the “never trust, always verify” ideology, which means that:

• All networks pose a threat to the organization.
• Network threats can either be external or internal.
• Threats exist irrespective of the location.
• All network activities must be monitored at all times.
• Unauthorized or unauthenticated devices or users should not be allowed to access an organization’s network. 

Why is this approach necessary?

If workers accessed sensitive data in one way – from one computer, at one time of day, from one Wi-Fi network – trusting workers to be responsible might be possible. However, in today’s complex world, we access data from everywhere on all sorts of different devices. Even the data itself may exist in on-premise or in the cloud. Trying to account for every new variable would be almost impossible if IT admins simply had to trust workers had to be completely responsible in every interaction.

Things to consider before implementing a zero trust model

Before implementing a zero-trust model, organizations must check the security measures they already have in place. They need to rethink their existing security strategies (like identity and access management and more) such that new policies are in line with the zero trust implementation.

Organizations will also need to review who can access what data and device functionality. This requires establishing what functionality each user requires, providing them access to only that functionality, and securing each user’s access to that functionality.

As the number of enterprise endpoints increases, the need for endpoint security also rises. That’s precisely why organizations around the world are implementing Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) tools to bolster device and data security. It’s now time to adopt a zero-trust approach to improve security, detect and neutralize threats, and ensure more secure access to business resources.