In workplaces of the past, IT teams could afford to trust the devices in their network because they knew them. After all, they issued and managed them.
But today’s work environment makes trust a little difficult. From work from home to the vast expansion of enterprise applications, IT and security teams have a whole new set of cybersecurity challenges to mitigate.
Your workers are human and are subject to human error. Phishing attempts are not always easy to spot. MFA fatigue is on the rise where a high volume of MFA push requests are sent to users’ mobile devices and by accidentally accepting one, attackers gain access to an organization's environment.
The result is a security perimeter that’s so stretched it no longer functions as a barrier. Organizations end up scrambling to monitor and protect an unprecedented amount of data generated by a distributed workforce. They also need to protect themselves and have a recovery plan for ransomware attacks.
What’s the answer? Easy. Redefining trust in modern BCDR.
Embracing the Zero Trust Security framework
What is the Zero Trust security framework? It’s an approach to enterprise security with the key directive to “trust no one and verify everything.” This flavor of trust encourages your team to:
Verify explicitly
Gone are the days when organizations could assume they’re safe because a user has authenticated themselves. With phishing attacks on the rise and more people working remotely, the chances of someone using stolen credentials are high.
How does the Zero Trust security framework address this risk?
By basing security decisions on all available data points, including identity, location, device health, data classification, and anomalies.
Ensure least privileged access
When you hire a chef, you give them access to the kitchen—not the whole house. And you’d be pretty suspicious if you caught them lurking in the attic. This same idea of place and context must now be applied to networks.
Just because someone works at an organization doesn’t mean they should have unfettered access to its digital environment. By leveraging granular role-based access controls, employees and contractors have access to what they need to do their jobs and nothing more.
Treat everything like a breach
If you treat everything like a threat, you’ll never be taken by surprise. The Zero Trust security framework encourages organizations to put tools in place that use micro-segmentation, continuous monitoring, automated threat detection and response, and end-to-end encryption to minimize a the blast radius of a cyber attack.
Putting the Zero Trust security framework into practice
Of course, applying all the principles of the Zero Trust security framework is easier said than done.
How do you explicitly verify everyone using your systems?
How do you give people restricted access without ruining the user experience and creating frustration?
How do you carve up your digital workspaces into smaller pieces so that potential breaches are isolated?
How do you protect your system in increasingly hybrid work environments that are divvied up between public clouds and private data centers?
And above all, how do you manage this security in a centralized, managed way that doesn’t zap all of your IT team’s time?
Download our eBook, The New Business Continuity: Enhancing BCDR with Zero Trust Data Security, to learn more about how Rubrik and Microsoft are partnering to help today’s organizations incorporate Zero Trust security into their BCDR strategies.