Zero Trust

A Zero Trust methodology is one that is critical to many sectors in an evolving digital landscape, where legacy security architecture profiles are no longer sufficiently robust to help us remain secure.

Consider a traditional perimeter-based approach to network security, where being on the network can afford a set of privileges to attackers. Adopting a Zero Trust approach, network security is instead considered an attack vector in itself and is no longer treated as a resource, where every resource access is subject to least privileged authorisation and strong authentication. This helps contain the spread of inevitable breaches across today’s modern workplace and associated hybrid attack surfaces, by assuming they will or have already happened.

A Zero Trust Model

Within a Zero Trust model, we commit to removing implicit trust within an ecosystem and instead promote a risk-based approach that encapsulates the three core principles of Zero Trust:

  • Verification of all entities that wish to access any resource
  • Subject entities to Least Privilege Access to segment and compartmentalise resources
  • Assume Breach, where you work on the assumption that an attacker is already inside your network and act accordingly

The current driver is the replacement of remote access VPNs for specific access to resources whilst providing more fine-grained conditional-access as opposed to pre-existing ‘always-on’ VPNs. However, as the market of technologies moves to adopting Zero Trust, it is important to establish your high-level approach and adopt robust security strategies and technologies that are designed to reduce the most risk first. Ultimately, Zero Trust is an approach as opposed to a single, one-fits-all technology. It requires you to minimise and secure your attack surface, understand and manage identities and how they access resources, and implement technologies that enable you to achieve your organisational goals whilst being compliant with your security and operational processes and governance in a holistic manner.

Adopting a Zero Trust Methodology

To enable our clients to firstly consider and subsequently adopt a Zero Trust methodology efficiently, and at a pace, which aligns with their business priorities, Sapphire’s Zero Trust services offer a cloud-native approach to securing communications over all resources and entities wishing to access them, across governance, architecture, technology implementations and ongoing risk management. Sapphire’s Zero Trust services will facilitate the adoption of key Zero Trust strategies that align with the evolving needs of our clients in protecting their applications, infrastructure and data in a scalable, resilient, agile and secure manner.

Sapphire’s managed service can also include Continuous Vulnerability Risk Management via Tenable One which can help organisations to understand, minimise and secure the modern attack surface across the ever-increasing technology complexity we see today.