Authentication isn't enough to thwart the advanced threats that cause most breaches. Discover how to hasten your audit cycle and quickly uncover any non-compliance with continuous, Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment. Traditional security solutions favor black or white decisions that allow access or block it based on credentials alone. However, digital transformation has changed the IT environment so that those black and white decisions are no longer valid.
Positive Points
For businesses embarking on a digital transformation, security is crucial. After all, a data breach could cost you millions of dollars and tarnishes your brand image. This is why IT experts need to put in place a stringent mechanism to handle vulnerabilities. CARTA (Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment) is one such approach that helps organizations achieve this goal by continuously assessing the risks of users, devices, networks, and applications. It uses fine-grained measures of confidence to make risk and trust decisions on a real-time basis. In contrast to the binary block/allow assessments of traditional solutions, this framework takes into account context and learnings from each interaction. In addition to reducing risk, it also improves business efficiency and agility by allowing employees to access critical systems with a minimal amount of friction. It is also easier to comply with regulatory requirements, such as NIST SP 800-207, when using this approach. This is because continuous risk and trust assessments are automated, rather than manual. This means that a business can reduce the amount of time spent on compliance management and focus more on its core competencies.
Unlike RBAC, which uses credentials, such as usernames and passwords, to determine risk, the Zero Trust approach relies on attributes that are unique to each individual user. This includes IP address, location, device type and operating system. This enables the system to evaluate risk on a real-time basis, and it can prevent threats that are typically launched via compromised credentials, such as zero-day attacks and insider attacks. While many cybersecurity professionals consider Zero Trust to be the future of IT, it is not without its challenges. To succeed, it is imperative that a company implements a holistic IT security strategy to ensure its protection from sophisticated hackers. This includes continuous Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment, contextual awareness, machine learning, and other advanced technologies. Leading cloud access security brokers offer these capabilities as part of their Zero Trust architectures to support a comprehensive security approach and optimize digital business outcomes.
A Zero Trust approach can be achieved through a network security carta policy solution that utilizes a combination of multiple components, such as a firewall, IAM (identity and access management), and an advanced IoT security platform. Essentially, it creates a virtual secure perimeter that allows only trusted devices to enter the corporate network. Then, it monitors traffic to detect anomalies and suspicious activity. If any of these occur, it alerts the system administrator to take action. A Zero Trust strategy requires a network that is resilient to attacks and can be constantly monitored for breaches and anomalies. This is because attackers are constantly evolving their tactics to penetrate networks and steal sensitive information. To counter these new threats, a Zero Trust approach must be able to detect and mitigate them with real-time threat intelligence and contextual awareness. This is why it's important to partner with a Zero Trust provider that offers a layered approach that includes both prevention and detective controls to protect your organization from sophisticated attackers.
Adaptive Response
Zero trust adoption is a cybersecurity engineering initiative that requires continuous risk assessment and management. This is the key to ensuring security posture aligns with business goals as hackers continue to proliferate and innovate. Traditional IT security solutions favor black and white decisions, essentially choosing whether to block or allow access to systems based on the potential for risk. This is not the case in today's business environment with its rapid pace of innovation and change, requiring security that moves at the speed of digital business.The first of Gartner's CARTA Adaptive Risk and Trust Assessment imperatives recommends moving away from a one-time yes/no risk decision at the login gate (managed by RBAC) to a continuous, real-time, adaptive evaluation of user anomalies using context-aware information found in ABAC models. Adding ABAC to your existing role-based access control (RBAC) capabilities enables preventative, detective, and responsive controls at the business transaction and master data level. CARTA is built on the principle that all computing services, data sources, and users are considered resources and should be evaluated as such. As a result, it provides a foundation for more effective and efficient security measures that eliminate the gap between business needs and security requirements.
