With the current threat environment against the US escalating in recent days, the US government from the top level down, commercial and private organizations can no longer depend on conventional perimeter-based defenses to protect critical systems and data.
A transition to a “zero trust” approach to security provides a defensible architecture for this new environment where no actor, system, network, or service operating outside or within the security perimeter is trusted.
This strategy places significant emphasis on stronger enterprise identity and access controls, including multi-factor authentication (MFA). Without secure, enterprise-managed identity systems, adversaries can take over user accounts and gain a foothold into your organization to attack or steal from you.
Zero Trust Not a One Size Fits All
Zero Trust is clearly a journey and not a specific destination. It is also a team effort requiring collaboration of your organization, partners, suppliers and more (our whitepaper linked here). WootCloud can help you with the segment of your journey around your device and IoT deployments – without necessitating a rip and replace approach nor installing agents on every endpoint. Nor do we suddenly encrypt and block most of your network traffic virtually overnight.
Zero Trust and Least Privilege
Enterprises should again take a Zero Trust approach to IT operations and security tools like SolarWinds. Limit access to systems, applications and networks, to only the vendor or consultants who need access to them.
Then, when the next compromised software update is downloaded, the threat’s communications will be blocked.
Securing Your IoT Devices – Context Does Matter – Now More than Ever
New technologies that drive business productivity and power our society continue to emerge, but they also introduce unknown challenges to critical infrastructure efficiency, reliability and cybersecurity.
Understanding the context of the risks these devices and IoT – and their users – present is essential to successfully and sustainably mitigating them. Context in our definition includes the devices, their OS, use case, users, user role, user department, user geo, whether managed or unmanaged by IT, and almost 300 more criteria.
It’s the responsibility of cybersecurity professionals to advise business stakeholders on the best path forward.
If you’re interested in learning more, request a demo on how best to approach securing IT/IoT/IIoT/OT assets – both managed and unmanaged.
Zero Trust and Asset Management
With regards to critical infrastructure, to prevent breaches like Oldsmar the need to manage asset inventory continuously is a must.
Tuning your Zero Trust strategy to uninstall or turn off unused, unnecessary hardware, software, and features to reduce the organization’s attack surface is an important, but oft overlooked, best practice to reduce risk. Furthermore, with a Zero Trust strategy, we highly segment user accounts to reduce risk of stolen credentials.
When it comes to cloud security, the network and partner behind the platform matter just as much as the platform itself. You need a proven leader in networking and security with the experience and the vision to support you as your organization grows and evolves. WootCloud partners with leading security and networking vendors to create deep technical integrations to ensure
Key Goals of Zero Trust Architecture
Evaluate your Zero Trust security provider on key criteria, including technical capabilities and business requirements, to achieve a few key goals of Zero Trust architecture as throwing more humans to babysit more security tools is not going to solve today’s problems.
You need a comprehensive, long term approach to Zero Trust encompassing your people, processes and technology.
You need a modern integrated platform, observing and synthesizing insight from both specialized and your existing general security tools, as well as improve the efficiency of those existing tools
Nowadays you need AI – built in – not bolted on – to detect and block the biggest threats of today – and tomorrow – to enable and demand performance with scalable automation
If you have this under your belt then move to SASE. We offer guidance in our mid-2021 whitepaper and webinar on the topic.
Business Value
Our mission, like yours, is to provide your employees, students, faculty and more with a safe, user-friendly and secure environment by:
- Giving Full visibility – with RF and Network sensors seeing 100% of your devices and infrastructure encompassing all stages of attack – infiltration, persistence, and exfiltration
- Reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR )– with AI/ML-powered, automated remediation that drives >70% reduction in threat hunting times
- Boosting User Experience – by reducing support ticket volumes, lowering alert noise for a >60% gain in operational efficiency (~1.4 FTE Service Savings per site/ per shift)
Each of these benefits on their own can offer 5-6 figure USD savings per year, shortening the payback period on your investment.
The perfect cybersecurity storm has arrived. Consider intelligent device and infrastructure security today.
To learn more in a zero touch, no obligation Demo or POC, please contact us.