Streamline and Unify Your Security Infrastructure with Zero Trust

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is forcing companies to completely rethink their workplace. Work-from-home (WFH), which used to be a model mostly for remote employees or used on an occasional basis, has very quickly become the recommended and preferred approach across many large organizations, for all employees. This sudden and significant shift imposes a significant burden on IT and InfoSec teams.

In the face of this shift, the move toward a Zero Trust (ZT) architecture takes increasing importance. The basic premise of Zero Trust is to eliminate implicit trust associated with locality of access, and move the emphasis towards protecting assets, not network segments — assets being users, devices and applications. In other words, Zero Trust assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets based solely on their physical or network location.

The four key principles encompassing Zero Trust are:

1. Identify all assets and their access/communication patterns
2. Deploy/enforce authentication, authorization and access control of all assets
3. Encrypt all data flows regardless of network location
4. Monitor data flows and assets to detect changes, violations or anomalies

The end goal here is to have a unified security framework for all assets. In doing so, IT and InfoSec teams can reduce the burden of dealing with different infrastructure for users on the intranet versus internet, provide a unified experience to users independent of the locality of access, and have one consistent framework for security. In a world where the workplace is increasingly shifting toward a “work anywhere” model, moving toward a ZT architecture simply makes sense.

With the workplace being completely reimagined due to the tragic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to streamline and unify the security infrastructure of organizations is perhaps never as urgent as it is now.

Find out more about the four key principles encompassing Zero Trust by reading the full article by Shehzad Merchant, Gigamon Chief Technology Officer, here.

Please contact your local Exclusive Networks Account Manager to find out more about how Gigamon can help your customers streamline and unify their security infrastructure with zero trust.