The Key Advantages of Zero-Trust Security Model
April 22, 2022
By Rhia Prajes
As the requirements of having a complex IT environment increase, organizations need to be able to rise and adapt to the ever-growing security challenges. One of the best ways that companies can refresh their security strategy is with the implementation of the Zero-Trust security model. Neither a product nor technology, Zero-Trust is a powerful IT framework that can increase business agility and security posture to defend against even the most intricate ransomware and other cyber threats.
In fact, according to a recent Forrester study (The Total Economic Impact™ of Zero Trust Solutions from Microsoft), Microsoft-based Zero Trust Solutions can deliver up to a 92% return on investment. To fully utilize the framework and achieve such results, however, an organization must buy in several key security mindsets: a user’s identity must be continuously verified across all apps & services (Explicit Verification), users must only have access to the resources they need to work (Principle of Least Privilege), and lastly, all IT activities are suspicious and must be scrutinized (Assume Breach).
Here are some of the few key advantages the Zero-Trust security model offers to an organization.
- Lower chance of data breach. Since the Zero-Trust model limits the end user’s permissions to the bare minimum, the framework helps improve overall authentication, network, and endpoint security by reducing the scope of access a given user has. This means that threats like malware or rogue employees are limited in gaining access to bigger parts of the organization’s network. According to the Forrester study, enhanced security reduced the risks of data breach by 59%, and in addition, continued segmentation and increased visibility of the network helped organizations diminish financial losses when breaches did occur.
- Increase efficiency of IT teams. Zero-Trust not only helps secure your organization but also allows your IT team to work smarter. Enabling centralized monitoring of your resources lessens the workload of generating reliable data, thus helping in making informed security decisions and preventing wasted time on false security alerts. For instance, the Forrester study shows that Microsoft 365 Defender helps organizations to triage alerts, correlate additional threat signals, and take remediation actions.
- Improved Security processes. Forrester’s study shows that when organizations applied Microsoft Zero-Trust solutions, their security processes relatively improved. Organizations reduced the number of security helpdesk calls by 50%. For example, it reduces the number of submitted support applications from remote workers when accessing their needed applications.
- Improved flexibility and employee experience. With the increased demand for remote work, it is important to make sure employees’ productivity and security won’t be compromised. The Forrester study added that the Zero-Trust framework helps accelerate processes to onboard end-users to new devices by 75%, thus, allowing faster access to employees’ needed applications and improving productivity, especially for critical tasks without compromising security. Aside from the increased engagement because of employee experience, Zero-Trust also offers business agility since it allows organizations to quickly adapt to the changing business realities and IT environment.
- Help reduce regulatory fines. The Zero-Trust framework helps businesses to create robust cloud governance strategies. Security and compliance processes can be better established, as key personnel can more easily audit the environment, understand the policies needed to comply with internal and external government regulations, and can simply consolidate and enforce those policies in less time, resources, and effort. Due to increased centralization of security processes, it also reduces the resources required for compliance management; thus, organizations can adhere to a wide range of regulatory requirements and likely reduce the number of non-compliance penalties.
- Reduced costs on Legacy Security Software. Finally, with Zero-Trust security processes can be centralized to cover the total IT environment and allow businesses to eliminate potential redundancies in their existing security systems. Microsoft’s Zero-Trust solutions, for example, can help businesses to reduce spending on legacy security solutions by over $7 Million by consolidating their functions into Azure and enabling them to retire anti-malware and endpoint protection spread elsewhere in their environment.
The ever-changing landscape of business technology sometimes compromises the security of an organization to adjust to new requirements. It is understandable that organizations want to both achieve scalability and profitability, however, maintaining security should always be at the forefront of any technological decision. With Zero-Trust, businesses can be best prepared to tackle these challenges.
As a Microsoft Gold partner and cloud specialist, Metro CSG can help develop an actionable plan to implement Zero-Trust and ensure unmatched protection from new and evolving cyberthreat.