How to Maintain Your Zero Trust Network

Now that you know how to create your Zero Trust security architecture, it’s time to discuss how you can maintain it.

Unlike many IT architecture setups, the Zero Trust model is not a “set it and forget it” cybersecurity solution. After all, you and your staff create new, sensitive data pretty much every day – which means you have to adjust your protect surface pretty much every day.

There’s a hard way to do this and an easy way… but let’s just talk about the easy way, okay? No one wants to work harder than they have to.

Create a Policy That Reinforces the Zero Trust Model

Once you’ve set up and secured your protect surface following the steps from the previous article on Zero Trust architecture, you need an easy way to determine what traffic should be able to access your protect surface, and under what circumstances. A policy helps you grant appropriate, secured access automatically – without you having to take the time to personally validate every access request (which would be impossible).

Your policy should answer:

Who should be allowed to access protected items?

Certain employees, vendors, and partners should be able to access certain things – but no one person should hold all the keys, if possible.

How should the protected items be accessed?

Perhaps it’s not a person trying to access your protected data, but an app or service that needs the item to complete a task. Is that okay with you? If certain apps and services can access the protected data, you should specify that in the “who” part of your policy. Also, are you granting “view only” access, “edit” access, or something else?

Why, or for what purpose, should the protected items be accessed?

Using metadata, you can automate this process for certain app and service access attempts. However, it doesn’t really apply in cases where people want to access your protect surface, unless you want to deal with manually granting permissions (bleh).

What protected items can be accessed?

You may have very sensitive data that no one should be looking at. You can get granular with your policy by saying who or if anyone should access highly specific protected holdings.

When should items be accessed?

Perhaps you want to block after-hours access to limit potential cyberattacks from different time zones. If so, this should be part of your policy.

Where should the protected items be accessed, and where should they be allowed to go, once accessed?

Do you want to limit access attempts from outside the U.S.? Are you okay with employees, partners, or vendors downloading digital items from your protect surface to their personal phones or laptops?

Once you have your policy, your Zero Trust methodology still won’t be a “set it and forget it” kind of thing; that’s not how the Zero Trust model works. Instead, you’ll want to make sure that your Zero Trust security setup has the best chance possible of staying ahead of cybercriminals.

That means you’ll have to keep making your Zero Trust network better. But you don’t have to do all the hard work yourself.

Let Interplay Do the Hard Work for You!

For nearly 20 years, the downright-awesome team of IT experts at Interplay has helped Seattle business leaders solve their tricky business tech and IT issues quickly. Plus, as one of the only true Managed Services Providers (MSPs) in the city, Interplay is the #1 source for a good selection of today’s latest cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions.

We’re happy to help you set up and maintain your Zero Trust network policy, so you have a helping hand securing your WFH employees – and we’re always happy to answer any IT or tech questions you have.

 

Learn more about how Interplay can help you secure your business tech.