Boosting zero trust maturity requires a strategic approach

Today’s business environment is changing faster than ever before, as are the threats and risks that organisations of all sizes and in every vertical face. With cybercrime attacks being reported every six minutes, service, connections, applications or parties that were trusted yesterday may no longer be trustworthy today.  

Organisations must continually monitor the threat landscape and respond with new processes and tools as part of an ongoing game of ‘whack-a-mole’ that can lead to a piecemeal security strategy. With security teams tasked with managing an increasingly complex stack of security applications and appliances, integrating new tools and solutions remains a significant challenge – one that becomes even more complex with the rise of shadow IT.  

As Forbes Technology Council put it, “most of these apps do not go through an official purchasing process and are used outside the governance of security.”  

The result is that integrating a zero trust framework may take significant time and resources which means many of the benefits may take months to realise, it they are realised at all. Adding to that complexity are legacy and proprietary applications that require bespoke solutions to counter threats and risks. But many of these solutions are complex and costly to maintain. 

The reality for CISOs and CIOs is that there is no ‘set-and-forget’ solution. Organisations demand an approach to security that protects them from today’s threats while enabling them to adapt to whatever is coming tomorrow. This is where the shift to zero trust was born. 

Zero trust is not about a specific product or service. Zero trust is a strategic approach that monitors activity on your network and in your applications, ensures that only authenticated users are connected and verifies that there are no malicious activities or actors within your trusted environment. Organisations need a way to assess their security posture and develop strategies to ensure activity is verified.  

This demands a mindset that enables organisations to be as agile as their adversaries. Achieving zero trust maturity is not just about technology. It requires a thorough review of every element of your security approach that is technology flexible, can adapt to changing threats and risks and enables organisations to leverage existing investments.  

Bringing a zero trust strategy to life requires partnerships and cooperation. Working closely with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), A23 focuses on securing organisations against today’s risks and threats and ensuring cost-effective flexibility. A23’s approach creates a trusted space for all organisations to operate effectively while protecting critical data, services and infrastructure. 

A well planned and executed zero trust strategy can mitigate many risks. It is critical that all users and activities are always verified and granted the least privileges they need to complete any given tasks. Always assuming that a system can be breached or is being breached and continually analysing all activity can significantly reduce the blast radius. 

Organisations must ensure their security policies and procedures are harmonised and support a zero trust strategy and that these are applied holistically with every element of an organisation’s infrastructure addressed. This includes people, identity, endpoints, data, applications, infrastructure and networks. When we work with an organisation, we ensure that each of these domains in covered so that every critical activity is protected.   

For this approach to be successful, organisations must partner with experts that have cross-functional experience. Every organisation has some level of zero trust capability that can be leveraged as a platform for improvement. The A23 Zero Trust Maturity Assessment leverages a data and analytics engine that is automated and provides insights into where there are opportunities to improve zero-trust maturity and gives actionable advice to achieve those improvements.  

With Gartner’s research finding the typical organisation has up to 70 different security applications in place, organisations don’t need more tools to achieve a high level of zero-trust maturity. What they need are the right tools, the ability to identify their current level of zero trust maturity and actionable advice and support to boost their level to their desired state. This requires a strategic approach and supportive partners, like A23 and HPE, who can help them along the journey without pushing them to adding more complexity to the technology stack.  

Read our whitepaper to learn more about how A23 and HPE can help your organisation improve its zero trust maturity level and effectively create a zero-trust environment.