Page 134 - Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2022 Edition

To properly and fully protect your evolving hybrid environment, you need to implement a zero-trust
architecture, which includes cloud-native security and an understanding of the limitations of network
perimeter security. Let’s look at some of the ways you can benefit from this approach:

1. Shrink the attack surface: Your users connect directly to SaaS or private apps and other
resources they need to do their jobs, but less frequently to the network. As such, there’s little risk
of lateral attacks or compromised devices infecting other resources, but still a risk of data being
exfiltrated. By diminishing the attack surface, zero trust curtails the impact and severity of attacks,
which reduces the time and costs associated with response and remediation.

2. Improve threat detection: All data-sharing and data-access activity must be continually
monitored and compared to baselines built on analytics and historical trends to identify anomalous
behavior and traffic. With this combination of monitoring user behaviors, granular policies and
rules and security analytics, you’ll find it easier to discover internal and external threats.

3. Prevent data breaches: Since everything in zero trust is assumed to be risky, every access
request is inspected and authenticated before "trust" is granted. Even when trust is established,
it’s continually reassessed in terms of context, such as changes in the user's location or the type
of data that is being accessed. A zero-trust model or architecture provides secure access to
everything and everyone.

4. Reduce business risk: Zero trust provides better visibility and control over what and who is on
your network—users, devices, components and workloads—and how they are communicating. It
also enables you to manage and enforce data protection and web access policy company-wide.

The ideal solution of a zero-trust architecture is a unified Security Service Edge (SSE) architecture that
converges and integrates data and threat protection technologies and acceptable use control across
private apps, shadow IT, SaaS apps and web traffic. The most comprehensive single-vendor SSE
solutions bring together a cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG) and zero
trust network access (ZTNA). SSE provides you with visibility across your infrastructure, making it easy
to create, manage and enforce policies in one place.

The right SSE also gives you powerful, cloud-native protection for any device anywhere—whether
managed and agent-based or personal and agentless. A truly effective, data-aware SSE integrates data
loss prevention (DLP) scanning, antimalware technology and remote browser isolation (RBI)—an ideal
trio for protecting the internal and remote workforce.

SSE also provides a single-pane-of-glass management platform that enables you to apply unified policies
across cloud platforms, endpoints, the web, SaaS and private apps, regardless of whether your data is
at rest or in motion. Consistent policy is applied corporate-wide and moves with the user and data instead
of being tied to each access technology.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – December 2022 Edition 134
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