What Capabilities are Required to Implement Zero Trust Security?

As organisations increasingly operate from remote locations and migrate to cloud infrastructure, it also increases the need for cybersecurity and cloud data integrity.

While many global organisations and companies rely on traditional security solutions like VPNs, they pose security challenges and risks as they aren’t designed to meet the needs of the modern workforce. 

This is why companies are adopting Zero Trust solutions to protect cloud and on-premise network applications and data from malicious cybersecurity attacks. 

In this article, we’ll learn more about the Zero Trust security architecture and ways to implement Zero Trust security solutions to protect your organisation’s network and applications. 

What Is Zero Trust Security?

The Zero Trust architecture model takes the “Never Trust, Always Verify” approach, requiring all the users, applications, and devices to undergo strict authentication and authorisation before accessing the network. 

Thus, while traditional security solutions assume excessive trust, Zero Trust access solutions prevent unauthorised access and allow remote employees to access network applications securely. 

Here are the basic principles of Zero Trust Security: 

• Continuous risk assessment and evaluation 
• Assuming data breaches before granting access 
• Continuous risk mitigation implementation 
• Limiting user access to the network and its applications 
• Continuous user identity authentication and authorisation for each user request

Capabilities To Implement The Zero Trust Architecture Model?

While organisations know the importance of Zero Trust, the real challenge lies in the Zero Trust implementation and steps involved with the same. 

Here are critical steps to implement the Zero Trust Security model with your enterprise network infrastructure. 

• Identify users requiring network access 

The first implementation step is identifying entities requiring access to your network resources and applications. 

These include not only your employees but also:

• Third-party vendors 
• Developers 
• System administrators 
• Serverless functions 
• Service accounts 
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA/bots)

• Identify devices and digital entities requiring network access 

The next step is identifying devices, as Zero Trust solutions track all the devices connected to your network. 

You must include the following devices when creating the asset catalogue: 

• Company-owned laptops/desktops
• Routers 
• Modems
• Tablets 
• Smartphones 
• Switches 
• IoT devices (smart security cameras, printers) 

Besides devices, digital entities like applications also require network access. Hence, you must also consider applications, digital certificates, and user accounts to enable secure network and application access. 

• Identify key processes 

Next, it’s important to identify applications critical to your business operations and processes to set the right resource and secure application access policies. 

To minimise downtime risks, you must migrate low-risk processes to the Zero Trust application infrastructure. 

When it comes to migrating and placing controls over cloud-based critical resources, you must implement a cost-efficient analysis, including 

• Performance 
• Workflow impact 
• User experience 

• Establish policies 

You must next establish policies and identify the following entities for each workflow and application: 

• Entities (connections to critical assets, like users or service accounts)
• Upstream resources (things flowing into the existing asset, like systems, ID management, and databases)
• Downstream resources (things flowing out of the existing asset, like event logs)

• Monitor controls 

Once you’ve identified and deployed policies and processes, you must ensure continuous monitoring. 

You must set baselines and monitor these essential activities: 

• User behaviour 
• Resource and application access requests 
• Communication patterns
• Device types to send access requests 
• Denying requests failing MFA
• Granting access to other requests 
• Denying requests from attacker-controlled Ip addresses 
• Ensuring the generation of all necessary logs 

Conclusion 

Ensuring secure and seamless network and application access is the key to enabling a secure remote working environment for your enterprise. 

If you’re facing Zero Trust implementation challenges, check out and choose the InstaSafe Zero Trust Application Access solution that’s easily deployable and lets your remote workforce access critical business applications securely from any part of the world.