The Critical Role of Zero Trust in Securing Remote Work

While the COVID-19 has made remote work a reality of our professional lives, we’re dealing with the most complicated cybersecurity environment we’ve ever seen. Yes, our capacity to identify and respond to cyber attacks has improved dramatically in recent years. However, bad actors haven’t slowed down either.

People move freely between work and personal life, across various devices, and with increasing communication both within and outside of organizational boundaries in remote and hybrid work environments. Identity, devices, applications, networks, infrastructure, and data are all entry points for attacks that exist outside the security of traditional perimeters.

This new reality necessitates a Zero Trust strategy.

How can Zero Trust help?

Zero Trust is a contemporary strategy for securing vital infrastructure, reducing future catastrophes, and making the remote work environment a safer place. To enable network access, Zero Trust prioritizes user and device verification, which is a security technique well-suited to remote work forces that blur conventional network borders.

Now, let’s try to understand Zero Trust better to see how we can implement it to have a more secure remote workforce.

The fundamental components of a Zero Trust architecture

Verify all users, devices, and apps

The Zero Trust security method relies on perimeters to keep bad guys out while “never trusting, always verifying” users as well as assets, files, programs, and data inside the perimeter.

The conventional method automatically trusted users and endpoints within the business’ perimeter, exposing the organization to dangerous internal actors and valid credentials taken over by criminal actors, granting unauthorized and compromised accounts broad access once inside.

Due to the pandemic that began in 2020, this paradigm became outdated with the cloud migration of corporate data and the growth of a remote work environment. As a result, enterprises must constantly monitor and check that a person and their device have the appropriate access and characteristics. This is why learning how to implement Zero Trust is essential for businesses.

Use context-based access

Layering in context-based access controls is another component of Zero Trust security. This entails gathering rich signals about the context of the user, application, device, location, and network. Context gives identity-based access the breadth and depth it requires.

An employee in a sales department, for example, could have access to cloud and internal resources like Salesforce or a business quota-tracking platform that are relevant to accomplishing sales obligations. Or, an engineer can have access to development platforms such as Github or Jira. However, neither the sales representative nor the engineer would have access to each other’s systems.

This reduces complications in the workforce considerably and provides increased security to the organization.

Safeguard all data

Data breaches are one of the main security problems organizations face in the new age. As Forbes states, data breaches can be avoided or limited to small datasets when Zero Trust is applied appropriately.

To avoid data breaches, Zero Trust inspects all material on a regular basis to ensure that it is genuine, safe, and secure, as well as all data transactions to prevent your business from losing data.

Ongoing monitoring and audits

All user behaviors must be continually watched and audited in order to achieve Zero Trust. To proactively detect and stop harmful attacks, threat detection and user behavior analytics are used.

Attackers are now using artificial intelligence and machine learning to carry out complex attacks, so businesses must keep up by adopting the same methods and technology to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals.

How Zero Trust helps employee productivity

The Zero Trust method will not only protect networks but will also boost employee productivity. Employee satisfaction is influenced by secure remote access to technology. Productivity may suffer if an employee cannot safely access applications and data.

Security must also extend beyond the point of access to safeguard the whole employee work session. Employees who can easily and securely access apps and data will have a better overall experience, which will lead to increased productivity and engagement with the company’s culture and goals.

Zero trust does not have to be difficult

With the organizations’ inexorable shift to the cloud, cybersecurity must change as well. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Some people might be surprised to learn that Zero Trust does not necessitate a total technological redesign. Rather, it is an addition to the organization’s current architecture that can be implemented incrementally while allowing the organization to use the tools and technology it already has.

Working with a trustworthy cybersecurity partner can provide organizations with the tools they need to achieve comprehensive Zero Trust network security and flourish in the new world of work as they confront increasingly complex and ferocious cyber attacks while also managing a remote workforce.