BUSINESS SURVEILLANCE
communications currently happening in your environments , and the connections that could happen . This will illuminate risky areas and help you prioritise where to implement Zero Trust controls .
Then , focus on securing your riskier and business-critical applications and expand as your budget allows . You can make incremental progress on your strategy rather than trying to tackle everything all at once . Concentrate on developing and implementing Zero Trust plans one step at a time to start building resilience today .
Aside from building business resilience , security leaders believe Zero Trust strategies improve their organisations ’ agility and support their overall Digital Transformation . In fact , around half of respondents said micro-segmentation specifically can help them reduce their attack surface and 68 % said microsegmentation enhances security to support expanded remote , work-fromanywhere models .
The barriers to success
There are two main challenges that can hinder Zero Trust progress : a lack of expertise and stakeholder investment .
The current skills shortage means that security expertise is in short supply and internal teams struggle to find the time they need to act on many of their goals .
Consequently , 62 % of decision-makers chose to implement data centre firewalls instead of micro-segmentation . However , this only led to more problems : the firewalls took too long to deploy , were difficult to scale and exceeded the budget .
Additionally , it ’ s true that having strong buy-in from stakeholders can advance Zero Trust implementation , but one of the issues is that these stakeholders often view ‘ Zero Trust ’ and ‘ microsegmentation ’ as marketing buzzwords that hold little weight in relation to the larger cybersecurity picture .
However , security professionals understand the resilience , flexibility and scalability Zero Trust and microsegmentation provide and must translate the value and urgency of these strategies to their stakeholders – the integrity of the organisation relies on it .
While skill and resource challenges are important considerations , they should not get in the way of organisations starting their Zero Trust journey .
Teams can start small and work their way up , gathering new skills and winning over stakeholders as they go .
Finding simple ways to start segmenting
Like the past few years , 2022 demands that enterprises balance business operations and security in order to prosper . Micro-segmentation solutions need to enable organisations to maintain this fine balance .
Segmentation solutions must provide simple and approachable on-ramps . If they require a system overhaul , you ’ re going to get stuck at your starting blocks . If they don ’ t scale , you ’ re going to get early technical detractors .
If they don ’ t adapt as your network changes , the friction will cause rejection of the solution . And if you don ’ t have some quick wins to demonstrate to your boss and your board , you never fulfil the strategic goals .
Already , 73 % of decision-makers consider Zero Trust and microsegmentation to be critical technical foundations of their security strategy and we expect this number to continue to grow as understanding of these approaches increases . Security leaders recognise the value of segmenting their networks to isolate a breach by proactively blocking attackers from moving around to access critical data . Understanding its importance , businesses need to start implementing their Zero Trust and micro-segmentation plans now to keep ahead of today ’ s pervasive threats .
While an organisation spends months planning and developing the perfect long-term security roadmap , the threat actors are still circling and the attacks keep coming . As the saying goes , a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow . Whatever the next step is in your Zero Trust strategy , prioritise action – push for stronger security now . u www . intelligentciso . com
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