The value of a well configured and robust firewall for your business cannot be understated. The business firewall is the blockade that separates the dangerous Internet from your business network and decides what digital traffic is allowed in and allowed out. However, more workers are operating outside of the office over the last few years, and therefore working outside the confines of the firewall protection. The same could be said for applications as well as people. More and more business applications are being served through software-as-a-service (SaaS) models and also operating outside the protection of the company firewall. According to a study conducted by DevSquad.com, 94% of businesses now use at least one SaaS solution. Given these numbers, a more comprehensive data security model must be put in place to provide the protections your business requires in these scenarios.
The concept of zero trust security is such a model. The idea behind zero trust security is that (as the name implies) all cyber interactions are deemed harmful and blocked unless specifically allowed. Nothing is trusted by default. No users are granted access unless specifically allowed. No program can access data unless specifically allowed. No data is allowed to be moved unless specifically allowed. The analogy is akin to having an invite list for a party. If you are not on the list, you are not entering the party. You can see the obvious security benefits to this approach. But I am betting you can also see the downside to the zero trust approach. Configuring this has traditionally been cumbersome and the lack of permission to operate can cause some inefficiencies for the business. They are many hidden hooks and connections between applications that, if not properly identified, can cause software not to work properly. These are still obstacles today, however many zero-trust security vendors have made dramatic improvements to their management software to ease integration and management overhead.
One of the ways in which vendors ease the transition to zero trust security is to deploy software in a learning mode. Software would monitor the network for a period of time and record what types of programs it sees running and what types of interactions are taking place so that a business can evaluate what it sees as necessary or not necessary. After a sufficient period of time, the software switches from learning mode to active mode where it will no longer allow ANY activity, user etc. unless specifically allowed.
As the shape of traditional business continues to shift, our data security methods need to keep up in order to provide adequate protections against the rising number of threats that face our businesses. Contact us today at (888) 600-4560 to speak with one of our experts or email us at info@coldencompany.com.