Looking for a more dynamic and adaptive approach to your platform's security? Adopting a Zero Trust Architecture approach has become the way to do it.
Let's take a short walk through what a ZTA is and how nvisia's Digital Foundations can enhance your ZTA strategy and strengthen your cybersecurity defenses.
Understanding Zero Trust Architecture
Traditional approaches trust users and devices within a given network perimeter, which presents obvious risks. The core assumption of Zero Trust Security Architecture is that no user or device should be trusted by default, whether they're inside or outside of the network.
Here are some high-level guiding principles for zero trust architecture:
- Never trust, always verify: Every user, device, and application must be authenticated and authorized before access is granted. Additionally, never trust that internal traffic is safe! Treat all traffic like public traffic, encrypt everything, from end to end.
- Least privilege access: Grant only the minimum level of access needed to perform specific tasks. This equally applies to users, device system accounts and workload identities.
- Micro-segmentation with private networks: All networks are private and exposed to the external world through a single regulated ingress/egress path. All resources are connected to the private network with private endpoints and manage access to those resources at a micro-segmented (organized by landing zones) level, using user or workload identity authenticated access rights to control access. Use the micro-segments to divide the network into small zones for associated resources to limit the blast radius of a breach within the micro-segment.
- Continuous monitoring and logging: Constantly watch for anomalies and maintain records of network activity for investigation.
By requiring verification and authentication of every attempt to access resources on the network and enforcing strict access controls and policies, ZTA greatly reduces risk of a security compromise and limits blast radius of an attack, greatly improving your network platform's security posture. For more on Zero Trust adoption and maturity attributes, please check out version 2 of cisa.gov's document.
What is Digital Foundations?
And why are we bringing it up in the context of ZTA? Well, because security is one of the three fundamental principles behind Digital Foundations (along with efficiency and consistency). We've designed it specifically to help meet those needs from a DevSecOps perspective, and to do so in a fraction of the time, using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and automated deployment pipelines.
Digital Foundations is a way to build a secure, scalable, and production-ready cloud infrastructure with IaC and DevSecOps pipelines, providing a holistic approach to hybrid-cloud infrastructure management and operations.
To be clear, this is not a product-as-a-service sales pitch. It's more of a connecting of dots between an issue (network security), an approach (ZTA), and a solution (Digital Foundations).
The point is that improving your network security doesn't have to be a tremendous undertaking that requires heavy, indefinite maintenance uphold. In fact, it shouldn't. It requires a foundation, one that can support a more dynamic and adaptive approach to DevSecOps in particular, and platform engineering more generally. That's what Digital Foundations does.
How Digital Foundations Unlocks Zero Trust
But how, you ask? Well, as we alluded to above, it covers the main bases of ZTA, providing:
- Secure Landing Zones: Digital Foundations establishes Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) style "landing zones" that are configured with zero-trust principles in mind. These zones can be isolated from each other, minimizing lateral movement if one zone is compromised.
- Identity and Access Management (IAM): Implementing robust IAM solutions within the Digital Foundations framework helps you meticulously control authentication and authorization using a least-privilege model.
- Network Segmentation: The framework supports micro-segmentation, enabling you to create granular zones, logically associate with secure landing zines within your network and clusters, limiting access and mitigating the blast radius of vulnerabilities.
- Monitoring and Analytics: Digital Foundations integrates with popular tools for logging network traffic and detecting anomalies. This visibility is crucial for identifying suspicious activity as part of your zero trust strategy.
- Automation: The use of IaC enables automatic and consistent application of security policies across your cloud infrastructure, leading to more consistent and reliable security measures. This allows organizations to lock down their cloud provider portals for read-only activities and eliminate "ClickOps".
These five elements are essential to the ZTA approach - you really can't "do" ZTA without them. Plus, with Digital Foundations you get:
- Faster Implementation: Digital Foundations provides a strong baseline, accelerating your zero-trust security implementation.
- Baked-in Security: Zero-trust principles are woven into the framework from the start, rather than being added later. This results in more robust security at its core.
- Cost Savings: Standardized architecture and automation can reduce the time, effort, and potential costs associated with setting up a complex zero-trust environment.
Conclusion
The importance of platform security cannot be overstated, and that gets truer by the day as cyber threats continue to proliferate, workforces remain distributed, and resources become increasingly cloud based. If you're looking for enhanced security, a reduced attack surface, improved compliance, and the ability to maintain modern environments, ZTA is the unquestionably the way to go. And Digital Foundations just so happens to be able to get you there.
