Cyber Solutions to build your Zero Trust Architecture
Why do companies strive to achieve Zero Trust?
Zero Trust in its simplest form: would you prefer to leave your house door open and chase away an intruder when you spot one? Or you would lock the door and give a key to only to whoever you want to find in your living room. That’s zero Trust, and whatever works with your most valuables – your family’s life and security – should also be applied with the most precious assets of organizations. Things are especially true as the damage from data leaks, and ransomware attacks are skyrocketing every year.
So, a good Zero Trust architecture should allow only whoever needs to access an asset to do so, and no one else. And for that to happen, all users inside your network must be authenticated and continuously verified.
With a Zero Trust security model, nobody is trusted automatically, even when they’ve cleared the perimeter. Instead, all identities are verified, minimum access is granted based on context, and activities are monitored to make sure controls are working as expected.
Zero Trust has become more appealing for organizations as IT environments become more complex – with mobile workers, Hybrid working spaces, combinations of cloud and on-premise, and data light speeding across domains, users, and countries.
Tools for Zero Trust
Delinea PAM: Identities to Control Access
PAM capabilities such as verifying identities, adopting multi-factor authentication (MFA), and enforcing least privilege are essential to address Zero Trust challenges. With Delinea you can:
Verify who is requesting access
Establish and manage unique, low-privilege identities for all users who require privileged access, including IT, business users, and applications and services. Enable just-in-time access via workflows and enforce MFA everywhere for identity assurance.
Limit and secure Privileged Accounts
PAM includes a centralized policy engine to manage all access requests and enforce approvals and governance throughout the lifecycle of privileged accounts. With PAM in place, you can reduce your attack surface by eliminating unnecessary shared privileged accounts and protect the ones you absolutely need in a secure vault.
Follow the principle of least privilege
To implement a Zero Trust security strategy never grant broad or standing privileges. Instead, provide only the needed level of privilege to perform specific tasks and only for the period necessary. Any privilege elevation beyond the minimum must be approved and limited in time and scope. Eliminating the use of local admin accounts on desktops and laptops prevents installation of malicious software and lateral movement. It’s essential, therefore, to protect access to both user desktops and laptops, as well as servers.
Monitor and audit everything
Leveraging Delinea’s PAM solutions helps you improve accountability, conduct forensic investigations, and prove compliance with government regulations and industry mandates.
Yubikey: Incorporate Passwordless Authentication
Strong authentication is a foundational aspect of that journey, enabling phishing-resistant user identity verification before access is provided. Thousands of companies and millions of end-users use YubiKey to simplify and secure logins to computers, internet services, and mobile apps.
Adopting strong authentication as a core building block of your Zero Trust strategy will jump start you on your way to enhancing the security posture of the organization with strong identity proofing and verification. Use modern multi-factor authentication (MFA) to prevent network access with stolen passwords. Strictly enforce access controls. Learn who users are, what devices and applications they are using, and how they are connected to the network so that unusual behavior can be detected
Most basic forms of MFA, such as SMS and mobile-based authenticators, are phishable and highly vulnerable to MiTM attacks. These methods do not achieve the strongest levels of phishing defense delivered by purpose-built hardware security keys. So if your users are using these methods to verify their identity, you may be compromising your Zero Trust promise.
While Many organizations worry that adopting a stringent security strategy like Zero Trust will curtail user productivity. However, when implemented properly, Zero Trust actually benefits users. With yubikey not only Authentication is at It’s strongest level, it’s also saves users time in comparison with other MFA methods.
Thousands of companies and millions of end-users use YubiKey to simplify and secure logins to computers, internet services, and mobile apps. Our customers include 9 of the top 10 internet companies, 3 of the 5 leading financial and retail companies, and several of the largest governmental entities around the world.
Perimeter 81 - Zero Trust Network Access for remote workforce
Perimeter 81 offers turn-key zero trust network access connections from over 40 global locations. Their simple administration interface offers quick and easy network development with granular user controls to define user groups, available applications, work days, devices suitable for connection, and more.
Perimeter helps to prevent network security gaps by enabling agentless access for employees and third party workers such as contractors, via HTTP, RDP, and SSH.
Organizations are quickly adopting and implementing security partner solutions such as Perimeter 81 that can apply security controls across environments consistently and quickly, with features that allow them to modify security policies and access as business needs change.
Complete Network Visibility
Perimeter 81 allows admins to better understand who is accessing applications, with visibility of applications running in the cloud and granular access controls. This grants the ability to view real-time user activity while streaming user audit logs to a SIEM provider.
Identification Policy Rules
Perimeter 81’s Zero Trust platform accelerates IT control over network and application access by defining and managing policies for users, user groups, applications, and application groups. By segmenting access via
user and application it creates a more granular alternative to network segmentation.
Network Segmentation
Perimeter 81 allows admins to segment network and application access using more granular user policy-based permissions, which help organizations to easily apply and scale rules to new resources and users. With more granular identifiers in place, the Perimeter 81 solution is more agile for application access.
Netwrix: Data Access Management – Monitoring Activity
Netwrix focuses on identity management and data governance software that can deliver zero trust security for the identity and data categories.
The best way to reduce security risks without impacting business efficiency is a modern PAM strategy called zero standing privilege (ZSP). With ZSP, administrators are granted just enough privilege to complete a specific task, for only as long as needed to complete that task. This just-in-time (JIT) approach dramatically reduces the risk of powerful accounts being exploited by internal or outside threats.
To help organizations effectively implement this strategy, Gartner offers the research “Reduce Risk Through a Just-in-Time Approach to Privileged Access Management.” It provides a model for mapping out an organization’s privilege use and explains how ZSP helps reduce the attack surface area.
If you are in the process of evaluating PAM products, be sure to look closely at the Netwrix privileged access management solution. It replaces standing privilege with just-in-time accounts that have just enough privilege to complete the task at hand and that are removed immediately afterward. As a result, there are no user accounts with privilege for hackers to compromise or account owners to accidentally or deliberately misuse.
Portnox: Cloud NAC. Easy as 1-2-3.
The only cloud-native, vendor agnostic platform that unifies network authentication, risk mitigation and compliance enforcement.
Visibility: Gain real-time visibility of endpoints trying to connect to your network, plus additional context such as their location, device type, and requested access layer for authentication. This applies to managed company devices, BYOD and IoT / OT alike, no matter if they’re authenticating via wired ports, WiFi or VPN
Control & Monitor: Define and enforce unique access control policies based on roles, locations, device types and more across your various network access layers.
Additionally, leverage Portnox CLEAR’s powerful risk assessment policy configuration capabilities to continually monitor the risk posture of connected devices – including managed and BYOD – enabling your network administrators to understand the true security posture of the network at any point in time.