Securing Cloud, Hybrid, and Remote Environments with Zero Trust

The Importance of Zero Trust Security in Cloud, Hybrid, and Remote Environments

Today’s cloud environments provide attractive targets for cybercriminals seeking to steal business-critical information. Zero trust security imposes a microperimeter and trusts no connection without verification, following the principle of least privilege.

Continuous verification, multifactor authentication, and context-aware policies protect users, devices, and applications regardless of their communication environment. This enables secure digital transformation while defending against novel attack surfaces and addressing the dissolving network perimeter.

Authentication

The Zero Trust philosophy relies on a principle of never trusting anyone or anything until you’ve verified identity and authorization. It applies to those normally inside your network as well as to users and devices outside it. This means every person and device is viewed as untrusted until they’ve been authenticated and authorized to use specific applications within the context of your business needs.

Unlike a VPN that simply checks login credentials, Zero Trust provides granular contextual policies and advanced security functions that validate the user, device, location, content, type of application, and other attributes. The result is stronger security that remains with the workload and doesn’t rely on a perimeter firewall or complex network segmentation.

This also helps prevent lateral movement by requiring that both the user and the endpoint are constantly authenticated to minimize the attack surface. It eliminates the need for a moat around applications and data and requires authentication of users and devices as they connect directly to apps, preventing attacks that start with stolen or compromised credentials.

Permissions

In order to follow a Zero Trust security model, you must have efficient identity and access management systems in place. This includes ensuring that all devices and users are securely authenticated and granted access to the apps, data, services, and networks they need to do their jobs.

This helps to limit the blast radius of any attacks and minimizes the impact of lateral movement by attackers within the organization. This is essential in a world where cyber-attacks are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated.

A Zero Trust approach to security also requires that all access to your apps, data and networks are verified continuously. This is critical because it enables you to implement least privilege access, which requires that every user and device be validated and vetted before they can gain access to your sensitive information. This also reduces the chance of attackers leveraging compromised accounts or service accounts that have been granted privileged access.

Context

With cloud, hybrid, and remote environments now prevalent in business, a zero trust framework is critical to protecting your business data and services. This approach enables you to reduce vulnerabilities, ward off threats, and control access amongst your employees.

To execute a zero trust architecture, you must have visibility into your entire IT environment and be able to verify the identity of users and their devices. This requires a combination of risk-based multi-factor authentication, device and posture monitoring, robust endpoint and cloud workload security, and other advanced technologies.

You also need to be able to move your security control point to where your users and your data are. This means you need to have secure, scalable, and intelligent access service edge (SASE) technology that supports Continuous Adaptive Trust.

Analytics

With continuous verification, risk based MFA, and behavioral analytics, zero trust ensures that users and devices only have access to the information they need. This is critical to addressing insider threats, which can occur through phishing, spoofing, malware, or other tactics.

The best way to fight this is by detecting pattern anomalies with user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA). This can help detect the most subtle deviations from normal activity, making it easier to detect malicious actions that evade traditional security measures.

A robust zero trust solution must be able to process massive amounts of telemetry data, correlate it with threat intelligence, and deliver context in real time. CrowdStrike’s Zero Trust solution adheres to NIST 800-207 standards, enabling the frictionless experience that today’s hybrid work and cloud-first businesses require. It also helps reduce the amount of hardware, software and personnel needed to manage TBs of security events, lowering overall security complexity and costs. This enables teams to focus on more critical projects.

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