Zero Trust: A Complete Beginner’s Guide

Featured article by Ibrahim Akturk

Comprehensive attacks such as cyber-attacks have been increasing day by day and can threaten the security of companies and institutions. These attacks make effective security approaches and measure a necessity. The Zero Trust model, which is among these security approaches, adds an effective dimension to the concept of cyber security and makes it difficult for malicious people and software.

As Zero Trust is a proactive defense strategy, the technologies that support it are becoming more widely adopted in response to growing security concerns. According to research, 36 percent of respondents stated that their organization is currently implementing Zero Trust security models in device identification and inventorying, network segmentation, and conditional access policies.

All the security challenges faced by organizations led to the establishment of the Zero Trust security system, which provides flexible, dynamic, simple, and high-level security. Undoubtedly, this approach has played an important role in protecting businesses, their data, and even individuals. In this blog where we explain all the details about this approach, you can start with Zero Trust and take your organization’s cyber security to the next level.

What Is Zero Trust?

The Zero Trust model, which has been developed in order to take effective measures against cyber attacks, acts with the understanding that no accessor within or outside the boundaries of an enterprise is authorized without verification and that devices are not trusted by default. In this way, it becomes easier to take high-security measures regarding firmware and updates, which are the main source of attacks.

The Zero Trust approach, which has become much more important, especially with the use of cloud-based technologies and mobile devices, provides access to company systems and prevents the information from being stolen to a large extent. Zero Trust, which requires verification and authorization approval for an effective security process, makes it difficult for cyber attackers to access the information they need while accessing company systems and increases data security.

How Does Zero Trust Work?

The Zero Trust model is not just a security program or technology. On the contrary, Zero Trust, which is considered a completely professional cybersecurity approach, works with the principle of “Never trust, always confirm.” It combines the steps that enable you to act with an understanding. For this, it includes enhanced endpoint security methods such as authorized session management, centralized password management, multi-factor authentication, and many more applications. In this way, access to network infrastructure or sensitive data can be controlled and approved at every step, thereby minimizing security vulnerabilities.

In order to keep your company away from complex cyberattacks, it is important that the security system you choose has technologies that comply with Zero Trust principles. In addition, you should pay attention to whether these conditions are included in the cyber security solutions that will work integrated with your company infrastructure.

How To Implement Zero Trust?

Multiple approaches can be used for this model, but there are a few things that must be considered for implementing an effective Zero Trust architecture:

The following are technologies that should be added to your existing system:

– Next-Generation Firewall

It’s good to use a tool that provides network protection, cracks traffic passwords, and can help with micro-segmentation.

– Network Access

Zero Trust network services allow remote users to access private applications without the complexity and risks of VPNs.

– Data Loss Prevention

DLP solutions go beyond just controlling access, allowing you to manage the way your data is used.

– Continuous Monitoring

You need to constantly monitor what people are doing with your systems and data in order to be able to continuously verify. zero Trust offers unique and advanced user activity tracking solutions that adapt data protection to threats and automatically personalize permissions people have based on their actions.

– Understand Access Needs

Decide who needs access to what in your organization. Remember to provide the minimum privileges people need and not allow more.

– Consider Your Culture

The company’s security culture will determine the effectiveness of all security models, both at the macro level and at the fragmented security levels. In the Zero Trust model, which enables you to realize external and internal threats, a supportive and educated workforce is the key to success.

Conclusion

Zero Trust verifies all your devices and users at every access point, providing a stronger security architecture with identity and access controls to your data and transactions. The native application segmentation of Zero Trust Network Access enables one-to-one application access once users are authorized. With detailed application access policies, only applications are accessed instead of providing full access to the corporate network.