Leveraging Zero Trust Solution to Ensure Users Have Access to the Right Resources

January 4, 2023

Enterprise security is a complex task. Security teams must manage constantly changing risks from various locations. Zero Trust is the modern approach to evolving threats in the world of cybersecurity that moves away from a perimeter-centric network approach (“trust but verify”) to a model focused on continuous assessment of trust across every device, user and application (“never trust, always verify”).

Granting Only the Right Access to the Right People

Zero Trust is a security paradigm to handle the IT challenges of today: customers, employees and partners are increasingly mobile, and consume your apps and other resources from every network, not just your own. Remote work places demands on organizations' infrastructures that perimeter-centric approaches aren’t equipped to handle: users with their own devices need access to the right resources from anywhere in the world in the most secure, yet seamless way possible.

To make this happen, network, password and device security are crucial aspects of employee access, but there’s still more to secure to truly enable remote work with a Zero Trust framework. Organizations first need adaptive access security to create a centralized authentication service that can extend across all your resources, whether they live in the cloud or on-premises. With centralized authentication and authorization policies in place, you can detect and block potential threats while also dynamically evaluating a user’s risk to your organization, reducing friction in their user experience by only requiring step-up authentication or outright denying access if necessary.

The Core Components of Zero Trust

Even with a centralized authentication service in place, tying together all the right additional services and solutions to create a robust Zero Trust architecture can be a seemingly complicated feat to manage. One thing is clear: Zero Trust isn’t a one vendor solution. You’ll need multiple vendors to truly cover end-to-end user workflows against the full spectrum of possible threats.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) offers guidelines on what Zero Trust looks like and recommendations on how to mature your organization’s Zero Trust practices. Most importantly, CISA’s foundation of Zero Trust includes 5 pillars: Identity, Device, Network, Application Workload, and Data. Viewing Zero Trust through this lens helps you advance Zero Trust initiatives one step at a time, meaning you won’t have to rip and replace entire parts of your infrastructure and can instead focus on systematic improvements pillar-by-pillar that provide cumulative value as your organization continues its journey towards Zero Trust Architecture.

Identity is CISA’s first pillar of Zero Trust for a reason: focusing on identity security is a great place to begin your Zero Trust journey. Identity is the best way to manage network security in a world where employees, partners, and customers are accessing applications and APIs both on premises and in the cloud using various devices. When Identity security is done right, Zero Trust initiatives under other pillars lessen business disruptions and set up people, processes and infrastructure for long-term success to meet the unique requirements of your organization.

With Optiv’s proven methodologies and Ping’s DaVinci, there are unmatched integration possibilities to proactively ensure your organization can both map and connect to whatever technologies best meet the Zero Trust needs of your team. Want to learn more about what an identity-centric Zero Trust approach can accomplish for you? Read the brief on how Optiv utilizes Ping’s DaVinci to ensure the right users have the right access to enterprise resources.