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InfoSec team: this Thanksgiving give thanks for Zero Trust

Thanksgiving – when families get together and express gratitude for everything they have. Traditionally this is a time for looking back to evaluate the past year and to give thanks for how far we’ve come. If you work in IT, InfoSec or DevOps and your organization is or has moved to Zero Trust, you have seen the benefits first-hand. Your job is easier, you can work faster, and using cloud hosted services and applications has never been more secure. This Thanksgiving, here’s why you should be thankful to your cyber security team for making the jump to Zero Trust.

 

Security without compromising on speed

DevOps and security teams don’t always see eye-to-eye. Conflicting interests mean that DevOps teams want to forge ahead with rolling out projects and systems, but security teams want to check out the landscape and make sure everything is secure first, which leads to an inevitable slowdown in processes. Where this can lead to a lot of tension, a Zero Trust system effectively envelops applications in a layer of protection. All systems across the corporate network and cloud applications are covered by the “never trust, always verify” philosophy. So when Zero Trust architecture is in place, DevOps teams can do what they do best without having to wait for the all-clear from security and without exposing the entire corporate network to security risks.

 

Working in the cloud without taking risks

Just because the big four CSPs employ great security minds, doesn’t mean that your cloud-hosted IT infrastructure is safely protected. Wrongly set your security measures and you expose your organization’s entire IT infrastructure to security risks. James Staten and John Kindervag explain, “It’s great that cloud providers offer customers a few options for setting up and configuring their cybersecurity. However, it’s a mistake to assume that the choices they provide are sufficient for every company’s needs.”

 

Once your resources are on the cloud and you provide access to them, CSPs provide, ultimately, minimal security options. Therefore, you need to prioritize the implementation of a strong security solution. If you choose to bring your good old network perimeter security tools to your cloud environment you will soon realize that they are too cumbersome to manage, not secure enough and don’t support the dynamic nature of your business altogether. Zero Trust solves this by controlling who has access to which resources in the first place, eliminating the risk for unauthorized users’ access to corporate resources. 

5 Steps to Go Zero Trust. Download the guide now!

Transparency of data for easy compliance

Audits, important as they are, can take significant time, divert the involved teams from their daily responsibilities and put major strains on every business. Having a Zero Trust architecture in place can facilitate the process as it allows security teams to prove that they are actively governing the access to IT resources. It then allows the auditors to see the data flow and identify the potential pitfalls, if there are any. Ultimately, this process ensures that IT resources are governed and well protected.

 

Agility of security set-up

Protecting applications, workloads, and servers distributed across multiple environments all over the globe is anything but simple. The need to set up and manage the security perimeter to align with the dynamic nature of the modern business can be a nightmare for security teams. But keeping your digital assets safe and secure can be far simpler with Zero Trust than with traditional VPNs and Firewalls. Zero Trust shifts the security from a network-based architecture to the context of the user, device and application, and thus waives the concept of perimeter-based security. It turns security set-up and maintenance to an agile process that is much more in line with the operational dynamics of the business.

 

This Thanksgiving we can all be thankful for Zero Trust. In today’s business world, cybersecurity solutions that don’t match the corporate needs and dynamics can hamper agility, reduce control, make compliance and audits difficult, and jeopardize security. During holiday season as well as regular business days, Zero Trust is our best way of keeping corporate resources secure but always accessible for all relevant users.

5 Steps to Go Zero Trust. Download the guide now!

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Luminate Blog authored by Adi Bar-Lev. Read the original post at: https://blog.luminate.io/infosec-team-this-thanksgiving-give-thanks-for-zero-trust