Protect and modernize your organization with a Zero Trust strategy

A holistic approach to Zero Trust should extend to your entire digital estate—inclusive of identities, endpoints, network, data, apps, and infrastructure. Zero Trust architecture serves as a comprehensive end-to-end strategy and requires integration across the elements.

The foundation of Zero Trust security is identities. Both human and non-human identities need strong authorization, connecting from either personal or corporate endpoints with compliant devices, requesting access based on strong policies grounded in Zero Trust principles of explicit verification, least-privilege access, and assumed breach.

As a unified policy enforcement, the Zero Trust policy intercepts the request, explicitly verifies signals from all six foundational elements based on policy configuration, and enforces least-privilege access. Signals include the role of the user, location, device compliance, data sensitivity, and application sensitivity. In addition to telemetry and state information, the risk assessment from threat protection feeds into the policy engine to automatically respond to threats in real time. Policy is enforced at the time of access and continuously evaluated throughout the session.

This policy is further enhanced by policy optimization. Governance and compliance are critical to a strong Zero Trust implementation. Security posture assessment and productivity optimization are necessary to measure the telemetry throughout the services and systems.

Telemetry and analytics feed into the threat protection system. Large amounts of telemetry and analytics enriched by threat intelligence generate high-quality risk assessments that can be either manually investigated or automated. Cyberattacks happen at cloud speed and, because humans can’t react quickly enough or sift through all the risks, your defense systems must also act at cloud speed. The risk assessment feeds into the policy engine for real-time automated threat protection and additional manual investigation if needed.

Traffic filtering and segmentation is applied to the evaluation and enforcement from the Zero Trust policy before access is granted to any public or private network.

Data classification, labeling, and encryption should be applied to emails, documents, and structured data. Access to apps should be adaptive, whether SaaS or on-premises. Runtime control is applied to infrastructure with serverless, containers, IaaS, PaaS, and internal sites with JIT and version controls actively engaged.

Finally, telemetry, analytics, and assessment from the network, data, apps, and infrastructure are fed back into the policy optimization and threat protection systems.