Until recently, an employee's ability to access company resources really depended on where they were working from. If an employee was in the office, they could access these resources quickly and securely. However, following the remote work transformation of the pandemic, the concept of employee location has been flipped on its head. Given the rise of remote and hybrid working, companies of all sizes must now move beyond presumed trust based on physical location. 

Enter Zero Trust. It’s a holistic, organisation-wide approach to enhanced network security. It’s not a specific technology nor tool, but a new paradigm for security, one that assumes that every user, network, and device is compromised and presents a risk. With Zero Trust, all of your users and devices must first prove authenticity before accessing your network. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) follows the same logic, but happens at the relationship, workflow, and access policy level. 

Zero Trust provides your technology team critical and complete visibility to determine whether an action is safe or unsafe, including:

• Who is accessing company resources?

• What type of device are employees using to access these resources? What is the state of this device?

• Which applications are people accessing? 

No matter where someone is working from, Zero Trust can help you solve for the “weakest link” challenge amidst today’s hybrid and remote work world. The market for Zero Trust is expected to grow 15% over the next several years, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. It’s all driven by the critical need to protect enterprise digital environments. In this post, we highlight some of the key benefits and considerations of implementing Zero Trust at your company.

Secure your Users: Who is Connected to your Network?

Remote work is here to stay. In the first half of this year, nearly 60% of workers in the UK worked remotely (including part-time and hybrid work). Yet, this new work-from-anywhere culture means that people are gaining access to your network from distributed and diverse locations, like home offices, coffee shops, coworking spaces, and whilst traveling. With so many users, knowing who is accessing your network has never been more important.

Similarly, it’s important to make sure that every employee has the right level of access, once they’re connected to your network. Employee roles will undoubtedly change over time; for example, perhaps someone is planning to move to another business unit within your company. As a result, that employee may no longer need access to the same database that was required in their previous role. With Zero Trust, it’s easy to make this a key part of your overall security strategy and limit access only to those who need it to do their work.

Secure your Devices: What is Connected to your Network?

Today, it’s not only where we work that is growing more and more distributed—it’s also on what devices we do this work. Gone is the traditional network perimeter of “the office” with its connected, desktop computers. The hybrid work world has dissolved this single large perimeter into multiple micro-perimeters. The result is a much larger attack surface for nefarious actors. Further, when technology leaders find they can no longer verify what devices are connected to  the network, they risk losing control of it altogether.

To fully secure your organisation, you must have visibility into every device that connects to your network. What does a given device do and how does it connect to other devices on the network? Zero Trust enables you to verify each and every such device. (Another related consideration to keep in mind is that Zero Trust can improve the employee experience through a single-sign-on across different applications and devices.)

In the early days of the remote work transformation, companies had to react swiftly, many without a robust policy in place. VPN was (and remains) a popular option to extend a company’s network into an employee’s home. But it’s not foolproof; VPN also exposes your technology infrastructure to networks and devices that are out of your control. With Zero Trust, every user and device within your network is not just behind a firewall or VPN, but is also proven, verified, and, therefore, can be trusted.

Protect your Assets Off and On the Network

Another challenge for security leaders is that remote workers are also human: At some point, they’ll use mobile devices offline, they’ll connect to other networks, they’ll take any number of unprescribed actions. These less-than-ideal behaviours, even if well-intentioned, present critical security threats like malware intrusions or botnets, once those devices log back onto your company network. Implementing Zero Trust Architecture enables your team to only grant access to applications on a policy-based, per-session basis to workers, after the device and user has been authenticated and verified. 

Another benefit of Zero Trust is improved monitoring and logging of events on devices, which will give your team a more complete view so you can better detect intrusion and compromise, with less noise from distributed workers and devices.

We hope this post illuminates just some of the benefits of implementing ZTA at your organisation. To learn more about how Optec can help your organisation with Zero Trust Network Access solutions, read our solution brief here or get in touch with us on 01280 878597 or sales@optec.co.uk.

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