What does Zero Trust mean? 

Rather than being a product or solution, zero trust is a strategy that involves many different elements that are all working together to protect your organization's resources or sensitive data. Security breaches have become more common as more organizations move to the cloud, hence the need to implement a zero-trust plan. 

There are four key concepts of zero trust: 

1. Don’t assume trust - This means maintaining strict controls at every point of access, and not trusting anyone or anything by default
2. Follow the philosophy of least privilege - Grant access to only what is needed, nothing more, nothing less
3. Break the environment down into smaller security zones - This minimizes the possible damage by slowing down the progress of a potential attack.
4. Verify identity at every step - Guarantee a high level of assurance between security zones. 

Zero trust involves maintaining strict controls at all access points and emphasizing identity over location. Identifying who is trying to access what and whether they should be allowed to do so helps you prevent unauthorized access and potential breaches. You can improve user monitoring with Identity and Access Management, which is a great place to begin your zero-trust journey.

Building Zero Trust Architecture 

Understanding the basic components of zero trust architecture will help in determining the overall approach you should take. The NetIQ Zero Trust Architecture is based on the "don't assume trust" mentality and consists of least privileged access, micro-segmentation, API control and monitoring and adaptive. 

1. Least Privilege Access: Grant only as much access as needed, with only the minimum permissions for the shortest duration necessary. 

2. Micro-segmentation: Break the environment down into smaller security zones to limit the scope of access. Maintain separate security controls for each compartment of the environment (requires distributed management of these controls). 

3. Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Require two or more verification factors to gain access to a resource; require greater identity assurance based on current risk state. 

4. API control and monitoring: Ensure appropriate control at the programmatic level as well as at the user interaction level. Control how many different devices and/or API’s are trying to access resources. 

5. Adaptive: Context-aware, continuous evaluation of risk – enables early detection of threats and rapid response. Dynamically respond to current state in context of current environment and past activity. 

Policy Orchestration & Zero Trust

In the era of near-constant changes to network configurations or cloud technologies, monitoring and managing identities has become almost impossible to manage without some type of policy management system in place. 

To strengthen your overall zero trust posture, security and policy configurations need to be in place properly which can help minimize potential threats across heterogeneous enterprise environments. NetIQ Policy Orchestration helps ensure that all of these are in place properly which can help minimize potential threats by: 

• Improving IT admin efficiency and centralizing policy controls
• Reducing risk and mitigating vulnerability
• Simplifying audit and compliance reports 

Policy, like zero trust, is not a technology, but rather a set of regulations and rules that govern a company or organization. Policy Orchestration is the process of deploying security policies across all data islands such as cloud-based Linux, SaaS applications, Azure AD, data centers, Office 365, mobile devices, and other technologies. Through these policy rules, you can control how your employees, vendors, partners, contractors, and other stakeholders perform their duties.

NetIQ Policy Orchestration contributes to your zero-trust strategy by providing a centralized, automated policy management solution under a single pane of glass. Other benefits include: 

Maintain compliance with your organization's standards and regulations

• Complete successful policy audits
• Organize and modify your policy endpoint settings
• Keep policies consistent across disparate policies 
• Maintain standard policy reports (script output, various pdfs, etc.)

Protect your data with a secure environment

• Increase breach protection
• Stay up to date with the latest security and configurations for your environment
• Preserving corporate and brand reputation
• Eliminate redundant security settings caused by disparate policy silos 

Manage and automate all your policies in one spot

• Manage policies in a more unified way
• Translate policy compliance settings for endpoints effortlessly
• Automated security and configurations
• Develop a clearer vision and policy guidance 

Regardless of where you are on the zero-trust journey, start small and focus on an approach that utilizes privacy and security to ensure strong authentication for anyone accessing customer data. 

About NetIQ 

NetIQ Identity and Access Management provides comprehensive workforce and customer identity solutions to enterprise-scale organizations – leveraging Identity to provide secure access, effective governance, scalable automation, actionable analysis and insight across their Cloud, Mobile, & Data platforms. 

Visit the NetIQ homepage to learn more. Watch video demos on our NetIQ Unplugged YouTube channel. Join our community. Keep up with the latest Tips & Info and stay informed about our latest NetIQ Product releases. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this blog. Log in or register to comment below.

NetIQ is part of CyberRes, a Micro Focus line of business.