Zero trust: a strategic approach to preventing cyberattacks

Logically, financial institutions invest a lot of money in securing their transactions. And with good reason. It is an industry with a firm commitment to digitalization. Cybersecurity is therefore one of its biggest priorities.

Organizations are increasingly exposed to cyberattacks, which are becoming ever more sophisticated. Hackers no longer seek mere notoriety; hacking is an industry in itself, and it’s booming.

Attacks arrive via email, by browsing on the internet and via an increasingly wide range of endpoints. With a helping hand from us, the users, being the main gateway through which cyber criminals gain access.

Today, technology enables us to implement cybersecurity measures to ensure secure communication and to prevent data loss and interruption of business operations.

Digitalization is advancing, and with it the number and sophistication of attacks. Cybersecurity has therefore become a critical element and a factor to be considered by any organization that wants to prevent an attack or security failure jeopardizing their data or even putting the continuity of their business at risk.

Added to this growing digitalization is the change in how we use technology in business environments. Hybrid working is on the rise in organizations, connecting from multiple devices to different applications is growing at a rapid pace, and cloud solutions and services are more in demand. This makes it increasingly difficult to ensure that users can connect securely and efficiently from any device to any application without compromising security.

Zero Trust as an objective

Faced with this changing reality, it seems logical that security strategies would also change, which is exactly what is happening. One of the strategies that organizations are now adopting is Zero Trust.

This concept can be understood as ‘never trust, always verify’. It extends the monitoring of the security perimeter to any location or device from which a request to access the company’s network and applications is received.

Up until a few years ago, the security perimeter we had to protect was within the four walls of our companies. We understood that the endpoints used to access resources were company-owned, issued and managed in fixed and predictable locations, usually on a corporate network behind a firewall. A verification method at the initial point of access was sufficient and company-managed systems with the same classification could intrinsically trust each other.

However, we have gradually incorporated new hybrid and remote ways of working, with geographically distributed work teams, and we have started to use the cloud heavily to store and process data.

The old security concepts have become obsolete. We have moved beyond the traditional perimeter, which is now any point from where a user wants to access corporate information resources. And this is where the Zero Trust concept comes into its own, a new cybersecurity approach that asks us to always question whether or not we should grant permission to each request for access.

The aim of the Zero Trust model is to have a greater visibility of users, devices, networks and applications, since their security status is verified with each access request.

In addition, the attack surface is reduced by segmenting resources and only granting permissions and traffic that are strictly necessary.

Moreover, using more authentication factors, adding encryption, and marking known and trusted devices makes it more difficult for attackers to collect what they need (user credentials, network access, etc.) to access the organization’s data.

Finally, users can have a more productive and consistent security experience, irrespective of where they are located, the endpoints they are using, or whether their applications are on-premises or in the cloud.