Friday, March 29, 2024

Trends, Cisco provide roadmap for navigating Zero Trust eXtended ecosystem

Businesses have been embracing technology that will help them evolve. However, this does not mean that their decisions are dictated by technology. It’s actually the other way around. Business strategies drive technological developments.

When organizations began to expand the workplaces to include offsite resources and remote or outsourced manpower, they had had to move away from the traditional concept of “perimeter security” for their ICT platforms. This is a huge undertaking that often requires the deep expertise and landscape familiarity of a trusted ICT service provider.

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Trends and Technologies, Inc. (better known as Trends) — a leading ICT services and solutions company in the Philippines — has helped businesses with their tech-enabled transitions. In partnering with multinationals like Cisco, Trends is able to customize ICT strategies and solutions for its clients.

Zero is the hero

In the white paper “Extending Zero Trust Security Across Your Digital Business,” Chase Cunningham provides an overview of the current trend in cybersecurity. He notes: “Security pros are still scrambling for new and effective ways to protect their networks and combat the impacts of hacking and exploitation.”

Businesses are now turning to strategies that are categorized as “Zero Trust.” The term refers to a security concept and threat response model coined by the American market research company Forrester Research. The Zero Trust model shows “how security teams should redesign networks into secure microperimeters, strengthen data security using obfuscation techniques, limit the risks associated with excessive user privileges and access, and dramatically improve security detection and response with analytics and automation.” In the past, hackers were empowered exponentially as they encountered less resistance once they were able to penetrate corporate firewalls. 

As such, Zero Trust platforms have been emerging — with Cisco recognized as one of the major players. Trends has the expertise to make this tech work for potential and existing clients.

Trustworthy setup

From redundant policies that have gaping exploits to an ever-increasing attack surface brought by the surge of users with their devices and applications, Zero Trust operates as suggested by its name. 

Instead of assuming that all users and operations inside the system can automatically be trusted, it requires verification on all levels whenever access is requested. 

This measure greatly reduces the amount of damage a breach can cause since it also doesn’t help that the increase in the touchpoints come from different locations, off-premise and on-premise clouds, and across a plethora of private-owned or corporate-managed devices. 

With many security vendors recognizing the clamor for Zero Trust-based strategies from many clients, choosing the most well-suited platform that these customers use will be crucial, as part of their respective Zero Trust planning. 

One vital aspect that a security vendor must have would be an advanced API integration capability. This ensures that their security solution product can easily be integrated to the customer’s Zero Trust ecosystem.

Main advantage

While Zero Trust cannot fully guarantee that organizations would be impenetrable from future attacks, the risk of falling prey to the “easiest of attacks” as well as being unable to discover a long-standing exploit, will significantly drop. 

Security teams who also employed the Zero Trust strategy for their organizations have met less hurdles from a number of compliance requirements and audits with the likes of FISMA, HIPAA, and PCI. 

Now, with the ease in compliance and the added conceptual simplicity from key elements of Zero Trust like virtualization and micro-segmentation, businesses who want to adapt to newer models and use cloud services have the most to gain.

Prep work

Forrester Research pinpoints three major elements that make up the Zero Trust eXtended ecosystem framework which organizations must take note of, especially when picking their security vendor. 

First is the high-level Zero Trust strategy based on their organization’s operational context. 

Following any good strategy is the means to do, in this case, the enabling Zero Trust technology. This could be any tool, software item, or platform that works in tandem with the strategy.

Finally, these organizations must consider a specific defining Zero Trust feature on the technology used. This must be in line with the operational requirements and overall goal of the Zero Trust strategy proposed. 

Aside from newly emerging platforms that revolve around the Zero Trust concept, the new strategic roadmaps of organizations are expected to shift to more easily incorporated data discovery and classification tools, simplified security controls, and a more integrated functionality across different security domains. 

Trends has the market-leading capabilities or components needed for any organization’s implementation of the Zero Trust strategy. The ICT business partner is able to tailor-fit loosely coupled sets of solutions, among other items that your business can build on or integrate with. To learn more, register to their FREE webinar this June 25: http://tiny.cc/8ym5pz

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