Modern-day cybercrime is a significant threat to businesses, as it can lead to disruption of operations, breach of business and customer data, unauthorized access to networks, and more. These threats are increasing in both volume, sophistication, and speed, with every day, there are new headlines about data breaches, hackings, cyberattacks, and various forms of crimes against businesses.

Overall, cybercrime has become so detrimental to companies that 75 percent of businesses feel as if they need to put more emphasis on cybersecurity and other cybercrime prevention practices. Roughly 30,000 websites were hacked daily in 2021, with 64 percent of all companies experiencing some form of cyberattack during the last calendar year

To combat these would-be cyber attackers, businesses are beginning to leverage every device, application, and tool at their disposal to keep their company secure, and their consumers’ data safe. However, while some practices and applications do help when attempting to thwart off cyber attackers, they still leave openings for adversaries (note that we never use the term “hacker”, it’s a rule in vendor space) and other evil doers to find their way into an organization.

Businesses are finding cybersecurity success in the form of a zero-trust architecture, a security framework requiring all users, whether in or outside the organization’s network, to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated for security configuration and posture before being granted or keeping access to applications and data.

While the idea of zero trust has been around since 1994, it’s only recently that the technology become the new industry standard. According to a Statista survey, in 2021, 42 percent of businesses reported that they have plans to adopt a zero-trust strategy and are in the early phases of doing so. In general, 72 percent of respondents have plans of adopting zero trust in the future or have already adopted it, as the security continues to gain momentum as remote work grows.

And according to a Deloitte poll, professionals at organizations adopting Zero Trust say COVID-19 has accelerated (37.4%) or not slowed (35.2%) their organizations’ adoption efforts, according to a new Deloitte poll.

“Interest in Zero Trust adoption predates the pandemic, as the model and framework applies a ‘never trust, always verify’ policy with regards to users, workloads, networks and devices before granting access to an organization’s IT ecosystem and underlying data,” said Andrew Rafla, a Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory principal in cyber and strategic risk, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “But, pandemic-driven disruption resulted in many organizations digitally transforming, accelerating cloud migration and realigning workforce connectivity and management. These fundamental shifts can also increase an organization’s attack surface, driving the need to take a more modernized and agile approach to managing cyber risk.”

Respondents also said that their adoption efforts are driven by Zero Trust’s ability to help manage evolving cyber risks including workforce risks like remote work and insider threats (35.7%); third-party risk (24.8%); and cloud risk management (20.9%).

Zero Trust assumes that there is no traditional network edge; networks can be local, in the cloud, or a combination or hybrid with resources anywhere as well as workers in any location. It’s an architecture based on zero trust that follows the maxim "never trust," always verify." It enforces access policies based on specific context—including the user's role and location, their device, and what data they are requesting—to block inappropriate access and lateral movement throughout a data environment.

Zero trust helps reduce business and organizational risk, by assuming that all applications and services are malicious and are disallowed from communicating until they can be positively verified by their identity attributes. Also, if an attacker is somehow able to gain a foothold in the network or cloud instance through a compromised device or other vulnerability, that attacker will have no ability to access or steal data because they are deemed untrusted. There is no ability to move laterally due to the zero-trust model of creating a "secure segment of one," which means there is nowhere an attacker can go. 

When zero trust architecture is incorporated with endpoint security technology, it optimizes the efficiency of a security network. With the growing number of endpoint devices inside of a business, it’s even more important to make sure endpoints are managed to help reduce the attack surface. Endpoint security products secure and collect data on the activity that occurs on endpoints, keeping workforces safe, even when spread out working remotely.

At DefensX, we understand that with technology expected to continue its dominance into the future, and the costs of data breaches ever rising, a reliable cybersecurity strategy is only going to become that much more critical to businesses of any size. We offer companies and MSPs our DefensX End-Point web Security, so businesses can rest easy and leverage web-based applications while reducing the risk of cyberattacks in the background. 

Our End-Point web security allow businesses to take control between user and browser, and check based on threat intelligence and user actions to automatically make decisions on granting access – read only access – full access but in the most secure way. With our solution, this all happens in real time while end users are browsing and working their usual daily routines. Zero trust reduces the attack surface and limits the blast radius—that is, the impact and severity—of a cyberattack, which reduces the time and cost of responding to and cleaning up after a data breach, making them essential for businesses not only in the future, but in the present as well. 

Contact us to discuss how DefensX’s range of end point security solutions can benefit your business!