We asked Elena Georgescu from Heimdal Security to tell us what she thinks about why it's important to extend endpoint security with Zero Trust.
It goes without saying that a solid cybersecurity strategy considers both network and endpoint security. While network security’s role is to prevent as many attacks as possible from reaching an endpoint via the network, endpoint security reduces an attacker’s ability to cause damage if endpoints are infected via USB drives or other non-network instruments. The Zero Trust endpoint security model complements the holistic approach by ensuring effective defense in depth, which makes it the new standard for a solid cyber security posture.
What Is Zero Trust
The Zero Trust model is related to the “Never trust, always verify” approach. What should you never trust and always verify? Every user, endpoint, application, workload, and data flow.
As my colleague Andra explained in her article, other main characteristics of the Zero Trust model imply ongoing monitoring and verification, the principle of least privilege, network micro-segmentation, workloads security, data usage controls, and multi-factor authentication.
Why the Zero Trust Model Is the New Standard for Your Company’s Security Posture
For any business, the advantages of the Zero Trust model are priceless – this framework minimizes the attack surface and enables companies to concentrate on what matters most to each particular enterprise. Therefore,
By restricting users’ access to data and assets, the Zero Trust model improves data and asset security. Constant verification significantly enhances data security efforts.
By enhancing overall admin and user-based security and streamlining security efforts, the Zero Trust model lowers insider threat and organizational risks, particularly for companies with large employee bases.
By limiting the degree of exposure to malicious players, the Zero Trust model ensures exceptional compliance and assists businesses in achieving an impeccable audit trail.
How to Integrate Zero Trust Endpoint Security in Your Company
The most important practices that you must follow if you want to integrate zero trust endpoint security in your company’s cybersecurity strategy are:
Conducting an Assets and Architecture Inventory
If you’re wondering where to begin, the answer is to create an inventory of your assets and learn everything you can about every component of your architecture, including your users, their devices, and the data they’re processing.
Furthermore, before migrating to a Zero Trust architecture, it is critical to consider all of your current services, as they may not have been tailored for the Zero Trust model and may pose some security risks.
Creating a Powerful Device Identity Policy
The next step would be to make sure that you can identify every company device using a single device directory. Making sure that every device that tries to access your network is authorized will help you significantly reduce the attack surface.
Creating a Powerful User Identity Policy
This one is not surprising – a strong user identity policy is the most important requirement of the Zero-Trust model. You should know which accounts are associated with which individuals and use a single user directory. This will help you easily identify responsible users in case of an attack.
Enabling Authentication Everywhere
In the Zero-Trust security model, multi-factor authentication is, as you can probably imagine, mandatory. You can learn more about the various authentication methods that you can choose from one of our previous articles.
A simple and effective way to ensure that your company’s security benefits from the advantages provided by the Zero-Trust model is to opt for security products that incorporate it.
Zero Trust Endpoint Security in the Heimdal Suite
Zero-Trust is a central element in the Heimdal cybersecurity strategy. As the company’s CEO, Morten Kjaersgaard, explains,
In the Heimdal suite, the Zero-Trust Execution Protection is a cross-module component included in three of the main modules: Privileged Access Management, Application Control and Next-Gen Antivirus. The module enables the intelligent diagnosis of all processes that are running in the IT environment of customers to identify and stop malicious or suspicious executions, because we know that we could not possibly predict future malware with 100% certainty. Heimdal’s Zero Trust component saves a significant amount of time for system administrators and, most importantly, it ensures limited access, increased compliance, simplification of addressing risks, helping customers to always be one step ahead of any cybercriminal – or insider threat.
System admins waste 30% of their time manually managing user rights or installations
HEIMDAL™ PRIVILEGED ACCESS MANAGEMENT
Is the automatic PAM solution that makes everything easier.
Automate the elevation of admin rights on request;
Approve or reject escalations with one click;
Provide a full audit trail into user behavior;
Automatically de-escalate on infection;
Final Thoughts
Presently, one of the best approaches for helping businesses stay one step ahead of cybercriminals is zero trust endpoint security. Transitioning security models, however, can be difficult and time-consuming because every organization has different needs, use cases, and existing technologies.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you want to discuss with one of our security experts how you can implement Zero Trust in your business and make sure you drop a line below if you have any comments, questions or suggestions regarding Zero Trust endpoint security – we are all ears and can’t wait to hear your opinion!
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