How much should you trust your endpoints? Zero!
Should a Zero trust approach be used when it comes to end point security given the rise of hybrid working? If so, which solutions are the most recent and effective? How important is education around endpoint tech security for the workforce? Will North, Chief Security Officer at MHR shares his insight
Zero trust is no longer just a buzz word, but a must when it comes to effectively securing endpoints within a hybrid working environment.
The days when security was centralised at the office, and remote staff couldn't access anything without a VPN, just don't work anymore. This was clear to see at the start of the first lockdown, when organisations operating a legacy model faced significant disruption while trying to set up and increase capacity of their VPNs.
With the explosion in use of SaaS applications like Office 365, and increasingly more resources stored outside of an organisation's IT environment, the legacy model doesn't make sense when staff are outside the office. A good analogy would be people living on the edge of a city and always having to drive through the centre to get anywhere, rather than taking a different route, like a ring road. It doesn't provide the speed and reliability to access today's distributed resources.
Organisations follow this legacy approach for a reason: to provide the maximum security possible. If an organisation wants to get away from this, a new security model is needed. That's where zero trust at the end point comes in.
Zero trust moves the security controls from the office to the endpoint. Where the corporate firewall was the most important security measure in the past, this becomes endpoint security tools and identify and access management. This enables organisations to securely allow endpoints to access any resource anywhere, as the endpoint itself has all the protection of an enterprise network.
Implementing a full zero trust architecture is difficult but executing just a few zero trust concepts can significantly mitigate the risks introduced by a hybrid workforce. The key is to consider what security your endpoints are missing when they step outside the corporate network.
If you have an on-premise web proxy, this needs to be moved to an endpoint solution to protect staff from malicious websites. If you have internet facing SaaS applications, authenticating your users is critical and two-factor authentication is an absolute must. Authenticating and checking the security posture of your devices is the next step, to ensure they have not been compromised themselves.
Staff should not need to be educated on endpoint security. A Finance Director's computer should just work when they are calculating their monthly management reports, without them needing to know how their computer's CPU works.
Security is just the same. Endpoint security should seamlessly protect staff without them knowing about it. No matter how much you educate staff, it is inevitable that sooner or later someone will make an error or be fooled by a phishing e-mail when they are in a rush. When this happens, the endpoint security needs to provide protection without the user's help.