Zero Trust: Solving IT Security’s Identity Crisis

Although companies are constantly increasing their cybersecurity budgets, this does not seem to help much: each day we learn about new large-scale data breaches. Considering that over 80% of hacking-related breaches leverage compromised user credentials, it’s mindboggling why so many organizations are still focusing on securing their network perimeters.

Instead, in times when the corporate security perimeter has almost disappeared, they should concentrate on rethinking their core defenses by maturing their identity and access management strategies to secure applications, devices, data, and infrastructure — both on-premises and in the cloud. This reflects a common misperception in the industry of the real attack vectors and illustrates the "identity crisis" that IT security faces.

Organizations need to recognize that perimeter-based security, which focuses on securing endpoints, firewalls, and networks, provides no protection against identity and credential-based threats from both external and internal malicious actors. Until IT professionals start implementing identity-centric security measures, account credentials will remain the largest unprotected attack surface for data breaches.

This keynote outlines an entirely new approach — Zero Trust Security. This paradigm assumes that nothing in your corporate IT infrastructure — including users, endpoints, networks, and resources — is ever trusted, and each interaction must be verified to decrease the chance of a security breach. Zero Trust Security ensures secure access to resources while significantly reducing the possibility of access by bad actors.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn about Zero Trust Security and the reasons for a paradigm shift;
• Understand the four essential pillars of Zero Trust Security in the context of Next-Generation Access;
• Learn how to evaluate your organization’s current Zero Trust Security posture against a best practices maturity model;