What Elements Are Needed to Make Zero Trust a Reality?
The Practicalities of Deploying a Zero-Trust Architecture  There are many different technology elements of a zero-trust architecture, according to the order. Schmidt, during the Tech Talk, said that its critical to be able to identify and be certain of the users that are trying to connect to your data.  Multifactor authentication, which the executive order requires agencies to adopt uniformly for data at rest and in transit by early November, can help in this regard, Schmidt said, as can single sign-on technology. Another aspect of zero trust is user context, Schmidt noted, and having the IT security system look for anomalous behavior, such as whether someone is logging on in the middle of the night or from a different location, before granting them access. In terms of protecting devices, Schmidt argued for the deployment of next-generation endpoint protection tools since the endpoint really is the battlefield in cybersecurity. Another element of device security is a posture assessment. Is your next-gen endpoint installed and actively running? Schmidt said. But its not just computers and tablets and things that are on the network; there are non-user-based machines  IP phones, video surveillance cameras, printers. Profiling can help you identify those dynamically and give them an appropriate level of access.  What that boils down to is enterprise device management. If you can control the policy on that endpoint, youre going to have greater confidence, Schmidt added. For protecting applications and the data they hold, Schmidt noted that this must be done for on-premises apps and apps in the cloud. Malware typically enters IT environments via proxies, such as email and the web, he said. He argued in favor of both Domain Name System security solutions and cloud access security brokers to catch malware. What were really talking about is least privilege, trying to identify how much access users and assets require and then controlling to give them just that amount, Schmidt said. As they use that, we get into things like user behavior analytics, or user and endpoint behavior analytics. If you can set a baseline to identify whats normal, then you can identify if they do something anomalous. Then, you can kind of figure out how the users are behaving and which ones that are not behaving, and then take action on that.  For network security, zero trust revolves around software-defined networking. If you can make the network restructure itself based on the users identity and the data they need to get through, thats great, Schmidt said. But thats not always possible in most networks. So, you look at things like next-gen firewalls.  However, because firewalls cant be placed everywhere, telemetry and analytics are critical, Schmidt said. These tools allow IT security analysts to watch the network and use the network as a sensor.  You can tell if somebody becomes compromised and then starts trying to get to their neighbors. That wouldnt have crossed the firewall, but youll see that with that telemetry, he said.