It’s high time that business leaders need to understand that zero trust is not just another buzzword and its a fundamentally different mindset that organizations need to embrace.
As CEOs, chances are your CIO knows something you don’t. Your organization’s cybersecurity strategy is broken, and has been since it began adopting cloud-based services. Furthermore, your CIO is likely rushing to implement a new security strategy you’ve heard of: zero trust security.
As a CEO or a business leader, you must recognize that zero trust is more than a buzzword and organizations need to adopt a completely different perspective, and the sooner organizations take this approach, the better. The conventional security approach is fatally broken in the face of many new cybersecurity threats, as most security professionals know, even if few are prepared to admit it. As a result, this is a situation which needs greater attention, as evidenced by the recent spate of high-profile breaches. You don’t want to be the last person in your organization to realize you’ve been managing your firm with a false feeling of security.
The Reality of Zero Trust
A fundamental assumption about network access is altered by zero trust. It assumes that any user, or device having network access is possibly compromised, rather to assume that any user or device with network access should be trusted by default. Zero trust works on the idea of least privilege, granting only minimal level of access required to complete the task at hand. For instance, the logical question of why to provide a user the ability to write content or delete files if they only need to read data. Even when trust has been established and access has been granted, that trust should be re-evaluated on a regular basis.
Corporate networks require zero trust architectures that go beyond typical cybersecurity constraints and include dynamic defenses and continuous monitoring to combat dynamic and constantly changing threats.
Zero trust architectures aren’t new, but as traditional network perimeters have vanished into infrastructure and users have dispersed, the idea has gained traction. Couple of years ago, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the number of individuals with unprotected devices on insecure home networks — and generally unrestricted access to corporate networks — increased drastically and almost overnight.
While several organizations adopted multifactor authentication and VPN connections to validate user access and provide secure connections, the lack of capability to examine encrypted network traffic consistently and efficiently was a challenge for organizations that heightened cybersecurity risk.
Supporting Zero Trust Security
As the scourge of cybersecurity breaches makes clear, zero trust security is difficult to establish even for the most advanced IT organizations. As a matter of fact, it will always be a work in progress. While many organizations have begun to implement zero trust strategies and technologies, only a small percentage have completed the process across their entire organization.
However, as a CEO or business leader, you may take steps that will have a significant impact on your company’s security. On adopting zero trust security, CEO’s and business leaders can continue to fund cybersecurity projects. Budgets for cybersecurity have increased in recent years, but zero trust requires investment in new technologies, processes, and capabilities. Most businesses, for example, have IT specialists who know how to track people’s identities and determine what they are authorized to see. Cybersecurity specialists who are also experts in determining the specific identify of machines are far fewer.
As business leaders, they are expected to give a top-down support. You may break through a number of organizational and cultural barriers by demonstrating an awareness for and understanding of zero trust security. Encourage your CIO and CISO to persuade business unit executives that zero trust is no longer an option if they want to stay competitive and if they want to remain off the front pages because of data breaches.
A Brief Conclusion
The most critical aspect for business leaders is that they should take the time to understand that zero trust security is more than a means to keep your data safe and to avoid breaches in a hostile environment. In the cloud era, zero trust security approach is a must for success of organizations.
The best way to let your firm confidently push forward with new services, improve existing ones, and reap the full benefits of digital transformation projects is to follow zero trust principles.