In an increasingly digitized world, cyber risks represent a constant threat to organizations. Faced with the possibility of cyberattacks, we often find ourselves uncertain about how to ensure the protection of our most valuable assets and maintain business continuity in the event of a security breach.
Do You Need Zero Trust Segmentation (ZTS)?
Recent research indicates that three-quarters of organizations have been targeted by ransomware attacks in the last two years, and two-fifths experience unexpected disruptions every month due to cyberattacks. Given this scenario, the question arises: do you need ZTS?
YES!
ZTS stops the inevitable spread of ransomware and security breaches, ensuring these incidents do not turn into cyber disasters. Through segmentation and rigorous communication management, ZTS blocks the most vulnerable ports and adopts a zero-trust posture toward all entities by default. As a result, you can rest assured knowing that any impact will be contained.
Keeping Operations Running
Although cyberattacks are inevitable, business continuity is non-negotiable. You need a reliable way to keep operations running, even on the darkest days in cyberspace. And that is where ZTS comes in.
YES!
ZTS provides complete visibility into the attack surface and allows you to protect your most critical assets, ensuring that only authorized workloads have access to those resources. In this way, any breach is isolated in a restricted area, allowing the rest of the business to continue operating normally while you address the intrusion.
Stopping Lateral Movement
You have implemented an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution, but what happens when a cyberattack inevitably becomes a breach? If something malicious gets past the EDR, it can move freely within the system.
YES!
A series of attacks emulated by Bishop Fox proved that ZTS stops the spread of attacks in just 10 minutes — four times faster than endpoint detection and response (EDR) alone. Attacks seek to move laterally, or east to west, to penetrate deeper. Their goal is to move from one asset to the next, steal advanced access privileges, and ultimately find sensitive, high-value data. ZTS blocks all non-essential communication, enforces least-privilege access, and segments your assets.
Gaining Visibility
Malware moves from place to place through network connections, and the only way to stay ahead of it is to know your connections better than the malware does. And that is where ZTS comes in.
YES!
A ZTS solution should provide a map of the attack surface, showing vulnerable points and the possible connections that make them vulnerable. You will learn which connections are open when they should not be and where access rules may be overly permissive. This allows you to understand the context needed to decide whether a specific communication is permitted and safe — or a threat.
Scaling for the Future
Today’s digital transformation almost always involves a cloud or hybrid environment that is flexible and scalable. This is the future in its most powerful form, but you will not be as secure as you need to be with yesterday’s data center security tools, or with cloud-based segmentation tools isolated across multiple elements of a hybrid architecture.
YES!
A strong ZTS solution is workload-focused and environment-agnostic. Your security solution should be able to migrate workloads from one place to another as you scale and bring security controls along with them.
Looking Ahead
In simpler times — not so long ago, actually — it was easier to protect the network. But today, your information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) are converging. Are they secure enough? Do you need ZTS?
YES!
ZTS protects not only the network, but the assets that traverse it. It provides visibility, dependency mapping, and asset-based segmentation for everything converging to drive your organization forward. This includes not only IT systems, but manufacturing technology, health telemetry devices, and powerful technology throughout the supply chain or public utility infrastructure.
To learn more about how to stop the spread of cyber risks and strengthen your security with ZTS, contact the ACTAR team today!
