Implémentation du Zero Trust

The following zero trust guidelines can help you design and deploy your zero trust cybersecurity framework.

They can help you establish a dependable data loss prevention (DLP) and breach avoidance strategy.

What follows is a practical guide to zero trust implementation.

Defining your attack surface should be the first item on your zero trust checklist.

To do this, you want to hone in on the areas you need to protect.

This way, you will not be overwhelmed with implementing policies and deploying tools across your entire network.

Focus on your most valuable digital assets.

Sensitive Data: This includes the data of customers and employees, as well as proprietary information you do not want to fall into the hands of a thief.

Critical Applications: These are the applications that play a central role in your most crucial business processes.

Physical Assets: Physical assets can range from point-of-sale (PoS) terminals to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to medical equipment.

Corporate Services: These include the elements of your infrastructure used to support the day-to-day work of employees and executives, as well as those that facilitate customer sales and interactions.

The way traffic flows through your network will often pivot on the dependencies each system uses.

For example, many systems need to access a database holding customer, product, or service information.

Requests, therefore, do not simply “go into the system.”

Rather, they have to be routed through a database containing sensitive and delicate information and architecture.

Understanding these kinds of details will help you decide which network controls to implement and where to position them.

A zero trust network is designed around your specific protect surface—there is never a one-size-fits-all solution.

In most situations, your architecture may begin with a next-generation firewall (NGFW), which can act as a tool for segmenting an area of your network.

Also at some point, you will want to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure users are thoroughly vetted before being granted access.

After you have architected the network, you will want to design your zero trust policies.

This is most effectively done using what is known as the Kipling Method.

This involves asking who, what, when, where, why, and how for every user, device, and network that wants to gain access.

Monitoring activity on your network can alert you to potential issues sooner and provide valuable insights for optimizing network performance—without compromising security.

Reports: Reports produced on a regular or ongoing basis can be used to flag abnormal behavior.

You can also analyze them to assess how your zero trust system impacts employee or system performance and ways you may be able to improve it.

Analytics: Analytics takes data generated by your system and provides insights regarding how well it functions.

Insights are valuable when you need to monitor network traffic, the performance of components of the network, and patterns of user behavior.

Logs: The logs produced by your system provide you with a permanent, time-stamped record of activity.

These can be analyzed manually or using analytical tools, such as machine-learning algorithms that can recognize patterns and anomalies.