Zero Trust, Simplified
The right Zero Trust solution can provide your organization with flexibility and efficiency while managing risks.
What is Zero Trust?
Zero Trust is a different way of thinking about networks and security. Zero Trust at its core is about the network pro-actively having and acting on information about devices and users to reduce risks in anticipation of potential attacks. The advantage of Zero Trust is that continually preparing for potential attacks and tightening the network’s security posture limits the “blast radius” of subsequent attacks.
Some attacks may fail entirely, while the impact of others may be reduced due to the security restrictions. Zero Trust often also causes attacks to be noticed more quickly due to the enhanced monitoring and visibility. Overall, Zero Trust reduces an organization’s risk, provides tools to mitigate risks other than replacing legacy equipment, and increases the efficiency, robustness, and trust of the entire organization.
“Microsegmentation needs to be a primary security control for local networks” – Forrester’s Best Practice Report
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes Zero Trust as follows:
Zero trust security models assume that an attacker is present in the environment and that an enterprise-owned environment is no different—or no more trustworthy—than any nonenterprise-owned environment. In this new paradigm, an enterprise must assume no implicit trust and continually analyze and evaluate the risks to its assets and business functions and then enact protections to mitigate these risks. In zero trust, these protections usually involve minimizing access to resources (such as data and compute resources and applications/services) to only those subjects and assets identified as needing access as well as continually authenticating and authorizing the identity and security posture of each access request. – NIST Special Publication 800-207
What is Missing Without Zero Trust?
Without Zero Trust, network and security professionals tend to take a more responsive approach. Mitigations are often put in place only after an attack occurs. It is also common to attempt to draw a few lines around portions of the network and incorrectly assume firewalls will prevent any attacks within these boundaries. Such defenses are only effective at blocking outdated, obvious attacks and do not shift the advantage away from the attackers.
Existing security approaches often suffer from a lack of visibility, lack of full control, and unnecessary complexities. Such security is no match for today’s attackers. Unfortunately, attackers have a variety of creative ways to gain an initial foothold in a network. An attacker with sufficient patience in a traditional network can then steal credentials, discover vulnerable systems on the network, and otherwise go undetected as they exploit traditional defenses. An attack that could have been stopped early by Zero Trust can go undetected for months, spread to the entire organization, and lead to your customers having zero trust in you.
A mature zero trust deployment reduces the average cost of a breach by over $1.7m, according to IBM Security’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021.
Without Zero Trust
- Lack of knowledge about what is in your network
- Security suffers due to difficulty of implementation
- Lower reaches of your network lack control
- Rely on getting alerts and acting in time to avoid a major attack
- Higher risk of losing customers’ trust
With CryptoniteNXT’s Zero Trust
- Visibility into the dark corners of your network
- Tools to manage inventory and policy below your firewall
- Identity and least-privilege access control
- Network is prepared in advance for attacks
- Follows network security best practices
Schedule a Demo
Schedule a demo today to see how CryptoniteNXT can give your organization the benefits of Zero Trust network security.
What does Zero Trust actually mean for an organization, and why is this significant?
It is true that Zero Trust is about changing your security approach so that every device and network connection is treated as untrusted and potentially hostile. Only focusing on the technical aspects of Zero Trust misses the bigger picture. Zero Trust changes how your organization interacts with security practices. By removing the assumption that everything is benign and well-behaving, your organization gains the freedom and flexibility to efficiently work and quickly respond to change.
With each device untrusted by default, organizations implicitly gain manageable ways to allow visitors, contractors, and employees to connect their personal devices to the network. Legacy systems, unpatched workstations, and IoT/OT devices that can’t be updated or run security agents are now protected from your network. Your network is also protected from them. The appropriate access and policies now automatically follow users and devices to allow the freedom to move around. In Zero Trust these benefits extend to traffic that stays within the lower levels of the network, meaning that the network is already locked down against potential attacks. Network and security staff can then focus their efforts on accommodating changes and improving the network instead of being concerned about the risks of a change or being pre-occupied investigating the smallest risks.
What people are saying about CryptoniteNXT
What Should You Look for in a Good Zero Trust Solution?
According to NIST Special Publication 800-207 Section 7.3.5, there are 5 key factors when choosing a Zero Trust solution.
- Does the solution require that components be installed on the client asset?
✔ CryptoniteNXT provides a completely agentless install for maximum compatibility with BYOD, IoT, OT, visitor, and unmanaged devices.
- Does the solution work where the business process resources exist entirely on enterprise premises?
✔ CryptoniteNXT is deployed on premise to protect east-west traffic and your organization’s critical devices.
- Does the solution provide a means to log interactions for analysis?
✔ CryptoniteNXT includes easy to use logging and monitoring capabilities, SIEM integration, and built-in analysis tools to directly adjust policy.
- Does the solution provide broad support for different applications, services, and protocols?
✔ CryptoniteNXT supports any protocols and any IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.
- Does the solution require changes to subject behavior?
✔ CryptoniteNXT recognizes that deployment and management is the number one obstacle to good security and is built from the ground up to simplify initial rollout as well as ongoing use.
How hard is it to implement Zero Trust?
Zero Trust is a journey that looks different for each organization but does not have to be hard. Forrester describes some best practices for integrating Zero Trust into your organization’s culture and practices. CryptoniteNXT also makes the journey easy by integrating several key capabilities into a single product. When CryptoniteNXT is installed in your network, the following Zero Trust practices become simple:
Inventory and admission control – CryptoniteNXT lets you immediately see the devices that exist on your network and decide how to restrict access. This visibility allows you to gain information about each device including vendor, operating system, age, network activity, and more. Possible workflows can include automatic access to the Internet or low-risk areas, allowing IT staff to “approve” new devices, or integrating with an advanced 802.1x deployment.
Creating trusted networking – Many on premise networks allow devices at the lower levels of the network to talk directly for certain network services to work properly. CryptoniteNXT automatically handles the validation and security of these often-exploited aspects to create a trusted medium that disrupts spoofing, scanning, and other malicious tactics while retaining the complete flexibility your organization needs to operate.
Identity-based policy – An implied principle in Zero Trust is the separation of connectivity from security. Routing will always be based on IP addresses, but security shouldn’t be. Rather than build security rules around where you are or what your IP address currently is, all policy in CryptoniteNXT is derived from each device’s and user’s identity. This change simplifies policies and network management because devices and users with different roles can now be intermixed without the need to track complex VLAN assignments or keep policies up to date with network changes. Whenever a device and/or user connects, the policies are now automatically applied based on the roles assigned. To simplify the rollout of such policies, CryptoniteNXT allows you to operate in a non-enforcing mode and to analyze how current policies affect specific traffic. Automated grouping suggestions and policy change suggestions further simplify management. Our deployment experts will also work with you to structure your policies around best practice workflows that enable you to monitor and refine policy usage.
Network monitoring – Zero Trust typically includes enhanced monitoring of network activity to record traffic and identify unusual activity. CryptoniteNXT provides a built-in view of traffic, new devices, and unusual activity or can provide this data to your SIEM. A key benefit of CryptoniteNXT is always-on, patented technology that continually tracks what information each device should and shouldn’t know and automatically blocks a variety of malicious network activity attempts. This automated monitoring and protection allows CryptoniteNXT to fill in the gaps in your security policy by concealing their presence and stopping an attacker’s efforts to look for them.
Microsegmentation – CryptoniteNXT’s inventory and monitoring capabilities are specifically designed to enable the creation and management of network-based, logical microsegmentation policies. Complete control over microsegmentation as appropriate allows every device to be isolated except for necessary communication. Dynamic access control based on user identity enables least privilege to be enforced by CryptoniteNXT within the network for all devices, including personal devices, IoT, OT, and legacy systems.
How Does an Organization Deploy Zero Trust?
It is important to understand that Zero Trust is an ongoing process, not a destination. NIST SP 800-207 prescribes a series of recommended steps. CryptoniteNXT supports every step of the Zero Trust journey. Initial creation of an inventory is a pre-requisite but your inventory requires ongoing maintenance. CryptoniteNXT provides an inventory and gives easy workflows to maintain your network and deal with special cases such as “shadow IT” devices you didn’t know existed.
Zero Trust also requires a clear understanding of the users, applications, and stakeholders present on the network. CryptoniteNXT provides network-based information about what uses your network and guides the creation of appropriate access control policies using best practices. Your organization will also need to establish processes that determine the types of access allowed, the risk level you are comfortable with, and how your users can request additional access when needed. A Zero Trust deployment starts out slowly and builds incrementally via monitoring before policy enforcement is fully enabled and refined. Once Zero Trust is confidently operating in your environment, its use can be expanded and continually adapted as your organization changes.
How Do I Get Started?
Our team of experts are ready to guide you through this process. By scheduling a consultation and demo today, we will focus on helping you understand the value that Zero Trust provides your organization and provide recommendations on maximizing your security. The answer may include a combination of technologies. Our experts will provide a variety of suggestions and best practices to help enhance your organization’s security.
Schedule a Call
Schedule a consultation or demo today! We will answer your questions and see how CryptoniteNXT can give your organization the benefits of Zero Trust network security.
What can CryptoniteNXT give your organization?
