You Can’t Secure What You Can’t See

Between us — there’s no such thing as zero trust — it’s a catchy term used to describe a very complicated approach to security. But just because marketing loves the term doesn’t mean we should ignore the concept. The idea of zero trust is the assumption that users should be granted the least access possible to […]

Between us — there’s no such thing as zero trust — it’s a catchy term used to describe a very complicated approach to security. But just because marketing loves the term doesn’t mean we should ignore the concept.

The idea of zero trust is the assumption that users should be granted the least access possible to be productive, and that security should be verified at every level with consistent protection measures. No device or person can be automatically trusted and everything must be verified before providing access to systems, and policy adherence must be continually validated.

Achieving this requires full network visibility, after all, how can you protect what you cannot see? To implement a zero trust architecture, network and security operations teams must be able to fully visualize all possible data paths and network traffic behaviors to truly understand potential vulnerabilities. Only then can they implement and enforce policies that eliminate risky pathways and segment the network effectively.

In addition to visibility, validation is critical for ensuring zero trust. Security policies are definitely not a “set it and forget it” situation. Because the network is constantly being changed by the people that manage it, consistent and frequent validation is necessary to ensure that policies are performing as intended.

While this may seem like stating the obvious, it’s anything but easy. Most networks have evolved over decades, it’s common for our customers to discover hundreds of devices they didn’t know they had. One of the biggest frustrations we hear from security teams is the amount of config drift in their network – which prevents the security policies from functioning as intended. If you struggle with these issues (as most enterprises do), a zero trust architecture is beyond reach.

Using the visualization, verification, search, predict, and diffs function within the Forward Networks platform can help engineers ensure their zero trust architecture is designed and functioning as intended. To learn how, read the zero trust use case.

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