Page 196 - Cyber Defense eMagazine August 2024

Zero Trust access for modern infrastructure benefits from being coupled with a unified access mechanism
that acts as a front-end to all the disparate infrastructure access protocols – a single control point for
authentication and authorization. This provides visibility, auditing, enforcement of policies, and
compliance with regulations, all in one place.

These solutions already exist on the market, deployed by security-minded organizations. However,
adoption is still in early days. This means that a simple access rule like ‘developers should never have
access to production data’ remains an unenforceable concept for many. We can see the consequences
of organizations falling behind on unified access control for authentication and authorization, like the
Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary, ransomware attack back in February which
disrupted prescription and physician services across the company as systems were taken offline to
assess and contain the blast radius.

By unifying observability and enforcement, companies gain leverage in further hardening security,
intervening in threat attacks, and reducing the blast radius. This means that if breaches occur, it may be
possible to remediate efficiently without taking entire systems offline that disrupt operations and
processes for companies and individuals.

Complexity is not going away

Although Zero Trust solutions are broadly deployed in network security, it is time for engineering leaders
to extend these principles to modern infrastructure, while making life easier for employees who manage
the resources and data driving their business. Modern DevOps infrastructure will only get more complex,
dynamic, and ephemeral as time goes on. By investing in access solutions that improve user experience
for engineers while hardening security, companies can protect against the riskiest part of their
infrastructure: the human element that attackers are exploiting.

About the Author

Ev Kontsevoy is Co-Founder and CEO of Teleport. An engineer by
training, Kontsevoy launched Teleport in 2015 to provide other engineers
solutions that allow them to quickly access and run any computing
resource anywhere on the planet without having to worry about security
and compliance issues. A serial entrepreneur, Ev was CEO and co-
founder of Mailgun, which he successfully sold to Rackspace. Prior to
Mailgun, Ev had a variety of engineering roles. He holds a BS degree in
Mathematics from Siberian Federal University, and has a passion for trains
and vintage-film cameras. EV can be reached on LinkedIn and at
https://www.goteleport.com/.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – August 2024 Edition 196
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