As organizations drive their digital transformation efforts, it quickly becomes clear that the approach to securing the enterprise needs to be adapted to the new reality. The security perimeter is no longer just around the on-premises network. It now extends to SaaS applications used for business critical workloads, hotel and coffee shop networks your employees are using to access corporate resources while traveling, unmanaged devices your partners and customers are using to collaborate and interact with, and IoT devices installed throughout your corporate network and inside customer locations. The traditional perimeter-based security model is no longer enough.

The traditional firewall (VPN security model) assumed you could establish a strong perimeter, and then trust that activities within that perimeter were “safe.” The problem is today’s digital estates typically consist of services and endpoints managed by public cloud providers, devices owned by employees, partners, and customers, and web-enabled smart devices that the traditional perimeter-based model was never built to protect. We’ve learned from both our own experience, and the customers we’ve supported in their own journeys, that this model is too cumbersome, too expensive, and too vulnerable to keep going.

We can’t assume there are “threat free” environments. As we digitally transform our companies, we need to transform our security model to one which assumes breach, and as a result, explicitly verifies activities and automatically enforces security controls using all available signal and employs the principle of least privilege access. This model is commonly referred to as “Zero Trust.”

Today, we’re publishing a new white paper to help you understand the core principles of Zero Trust along with a maturity model, which breaks down requirements across the six foundational elements, to help guide your digital transformation journey.

Download the Microsoft Zero Trust Maturity Model today!

Learn more about Zero Trust and Microsoft Security.

Also, bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. And follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

To learn more about how you can protect your time and empower your team, check out the cybersecurity awareness page this month.

The post Traditional perimeter-based network defense is obsolete—transform to a Zero Trust model appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.