Zero Trust Architecture in Mission-Critical Systems: From Perimeter Security to Continuous Verification

Abstract

Higher-risk organizations in health care, finance, and law enforcement are experiencing increasing cybersecurity risk that threatens the traditional perimeter-based security model. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) involves a fundamental shift in the way we think about security. ZTA eliminates trust assumptions, fixes legacy trust-based security models, and shifts to a model that assumes every access request must be verified, and does so across every request regardless of where the request originates. The "never trust, always verify" model that ZTA operates in extends to all interactions with devices, applications, and machine-to-machine communications, expanding the security coverage to the overall ecosystem. The incorporation of artificial intelligence expands ZTA as well as behavior analytics, anomaly detection, and modifying policies in a real-time sense of risk. Organizations will be able to identify unusual behavior and mitigate access for the normal user of those systems, instead of static Non-PJudicial Acquisition access. Using ZTA in higher-risk organizations has settled operations since its inception and demonstrated effectiveness in breach prevention, regulatory compliance, and overall operational resiliency. ZTA is centered upon identity, micro-segmentation, and least-privilege principles that are rooted in identity, which greatly lowers the attack surface, and is transparent to normal operating system availability. ZTA is a critical piece of infrastructure for organizations that deal with sensitive data and critical operations. ZTA provides a tangible way forward in moving towards a sustainable model for establishing systemic trust and an institution's credibility, especially as organizational ecosystems become increasingly complex and threatened.