Preventing Business Sabotage? Trust No One, Verify Everyone

Cybersecurity is a complicated beast. Not only do you have to be sure that you’re protected from threats coming from outside your business, there are also a few very real threats that can originate from inside your business, too. Both are critical to prevent, which can be quite effectively accomplished via a zero trust approach to your security.

Let’s talk about zero trust, and how it helps protect your business on all fronts.

First Off, Let’s Define Zero Trust

With most traditional networks only needing a username and password combination when you’re initially logging in, and granting carte blanche access to everything once those credentials were provided, these traditional networks are prone to various security risks coming from both inside and outside the organizations that maintain them. This is not good.

Zero trust is the opposite approach. Instead of taking this initial access at face value and allowing everything else on the network to be accessed based on its merits, zero trust requires authentication at every step. As a result, zero trust is inherently more secure, and with insider threats and remote work both very common right now, it is all the more invaluable for a business to make use of.

How Zero Trust Helps Secure Your Business’ Technology

The zero trust policy starts with classification. Not all of your organization’s data needs zero trust protection. Once you’ve determined that data is zero trust worthy, you will then attach additional authentication to it. This means that if one of your employees wants to access it, he/she would not only need permission to access that data, but it will need to be set up with the proper authorization capabilities to do so. 

With these kinds of security protocols in place, you can successfully ward against unauthorized access. The more sensitive the data, the less likely your average employee will need access to it. By mitigating potential security and privacy problems through zero trust policies and procedures—including controlling who has access—you significantly reduce the risk of reputational damage, data loss, and other negative consequences.

What to Know About Setting Up Zero Trust

We already explained that zero trust begins with classifying data that needs this protection. Unfortunately, this strategy really takes time and attention to implement. Not only are business’ information systems complex, costs associated with a zero trust policy can rise rapidly, making it difficult for some organizations to see the strategy through. What’s more, with so many businesses leaning heavily on cloud computing, it can be difficult for an organization to keep consistency in the management of their security and privacy efforts, often to the detriment of the organization. 

Since one-in-five cyberattacks are caused by deliberate actions carried out by insiders, and another 50 percent-or-so are the result of insider mistakes or negligence it stands to reason that doing what you can to protect your business’ most important digital assets with zero-trust protection is not only a good data security practice, it’s a solid business strategy. 

If you would like to talk to our IT professionals about what it will take to begin implementing zero-trust policies to help improve your organization’s data security and privacy, give us a call today at (403) 210-2927.