Moving to a Zero Trust security strategy takes several months of hard work and many hours of ongoing monitoring and management .
Prior to enforcement , it is recommended to identify and build company policies and then soft launching policies in logging mode to help refine the picture of what ’ s going on in the environment .
This offers the opportunity to test processes before launch , to both mitigate the risk of taking down critical systems and to identify patterns and processes that can be automated . From there , adopt rolling implementations to subsets of users – in parallel to business ' existing security systems at first – to iron out processes and build confidence in the user base .
It ’ s worth mentioning that it ’ s likely to be very difficult to get all this right without using agile methodologies within the project to deploy DevOps .
The early stages are a lot of work with a lot of changing priorities . So use agile methodologies to hasten and pivot where necessary .
Furthermore , operational overheads can quickly mount , owing to the multiple and ongoing changes and updates to infrastructure and policy . DevOps can help here as IT teams work towards automating user and device updates , or application and systems access flows .
With infrastructure as code , for example , systems can be created that allow users to self-serve by registering a ticket for a new device , which then pushes out an update to the infrastructure . There are also technologies now that can help deploy DevOps to legacy workloads as well as apps built in a legacy manner .
Zero Trust is worth the effort
Moving to a Zero Trust security strategy takes several months of hard work and many hours of on going monitoring and management . And yet it ’ s a journey we expect the majority of enterprises will undertake . The shift we have seen to remote work this past year won ’ t reverse fully and for some , it may become the norm . So executive-level anxieties will remain over whether users ’ endpoints are protected , the mitigation of insider threats and the risks of lateral movement by intruders should they make it through their perimeter defences .
It ’ s not magic ; there ’ s no silver bullet in security . Zero Trust is a way to move organisations away from perimeter-based security to a Secure Access Service Edge ( SASE ) as businesses continue their Digital Transformation . u
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