As companies look to reduce corporate risk, protect against data breaches and other incidents, and maintain regulatory compliance, a zero-trust security strategy provides significant advantages when compared to legacy models. Zero-trust is only effective if it is enforced and supported by strong security solutions. For most organizations, cloud-based solutions are the only means of supporting a secure, high-performance, and scalable zero trust architecture. 

Effective Zero-Trust is Resource-Intensive 

Zero-trust security says that no one, internal or external, should be implicitly trusted. Instead, requests for access to corporate resources are considered on a case-by-case basis. Access controls are defined based on the principle of least privilege, minimizing access, and limiting the potential impact of a compromised account. 

While zero-trust provides much better security than legacy models, it comes at the cost of additional resource consumption. Unlike virtual private networks (VPNs) used by the legacy security models, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) solutions must evaluate each access request against role-based access controls and other criteria. Authenticated users are monitored throughout their session for potential threats or risky actions, and these sessions are terminated as needed. 

Why Zero-Trust Should Be Built in the Cloud 

In the modern network, on-prem security architectures increasingly causes network latency and performance degradation. As organizations work to implement zero-trust security across their entire IT infrastructures, security architectures should move to the cloud due to the benefits: 

• Asset Locations Agnostic: Deploying security in the cloud means that it is close to where an organization’s applications and data are located, reducing the network latency and performance impacts of security inspection. 
• Greater Scalability: Cloud-native ZTNA solutions can scale to meet demand. 
• Global Reach: A ZTNA solution deployed as part of a global network can minimize latency impacts on user requests by bringing security near the network edge. 

Cloud-based — and more specifically cloud-native — security is essential to implementing effective zero-trust security without sacrificing network performance and employee productivity. 

Implementing Zero-Trust with SSE and SASE 

A globally distributed, cloud-native ZTNA solution can meet the access control requirements of a corporate zero-trust security program. Effective zero-trust is more than simply implementing least privilege access controls for all access requests. Once a user has authenticated, their entire session should be monitored for suspicious or malicious activities that could place the organization at risk. 

Security Service Edge (SSE) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) are ideally suited to implementing zero-trust security for the growing corporate WAN (Wide Area Networking). SSE and SASE solutions integrate ZTNA functionality with a full network security stack. Deployed as a global, cloud-native solution, SSE and SASE implement a scalable, high-performance zero-trust architecture. 

Learn more about how SASE makes building a zero-trust security architecture that grows with the business easy by contacting us at Access Tech. We will assess your security needs and provide you with the best options for your business.  

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