Initially introduced by Forrester, Zero Trust is an alternative to the traditional “castle and moat” security strategy. While popular in the past, perimeter-focused defenses are no longer as effective today. With threats increasingly lurking in east-west traffic, enterprises need new layered security approaches to ensure a strong security posture.
The Zero Trust framework (https://www.akamai.com/our-thinking/zero-trust/zero-trust-security-model) assumes that every user, device, system, or connection is already compromised by default, whether it originates from inside or outside the network. The involved part comes in building an architecture that supports this principle while allowing legitimate business activities to continue without interruption or latency. This new framework has resonated with network security professionals from its beginnings. However, it’s taken both vendors and enterprises years to figure out how to realize it in environments without drowning in infrastructure complexity.
Today, the Forrester Zero Trust framework and technologies that enable it, such as microsegmentation, have matured to the point where it is practical to implement at scale in organizations of any size. While there is no single security vendor that addresses every aspect of Forrester’s Zero Trust framework, microsegmentation can help network security teams significantly advance the maturity of their Zero Trust initiatives.
The first step toward realizing Zero Trust is gaining a complete understanding of your environment and the critical assets you are trying to protect. A good microsegmentation solution can help you collect detailed information from workloads, endpoints, and networks. This will help you understand the relationships and dependencies between your workloads and endpoints, along with their normal communication patterns.
You can then use this data to build the foundation of your Zero Trust program, starting with your highest-priority assets. Using granular segmentation controls, you can create microperimeters around specific applications and environments that only allow activities your teams explicitly authorize. Zero Trust is primarily about implementing policies that deny all actions that aren’t expressly allowed and verified. However, software-defined microsegmentation also gives IT security teams the agility to modify policies quickly to meet new security use cases or changing business requirements.
In addition to serving as your visibility and policy foundation for Zero Trust, a microsegmentation solution should also continuously monitor your environments for possible threats and violations of your Zero Trust policies. This will ensure that your Zero Trust posture remains solid even as your applications, systems, and environments change over time.