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As technologists, many of us like to play with tools; especially when we discover a cool new feature of some product. We immediately look for a use case, then try to persuade our leaders to buy it so we can implement it. While this has often helped advance security programs or controls, it is also how we created a massive technology debt and complexity over the years.
In many conversations with CIOs and CISOs, operations managers, architects, and engineers, the number of redundant technologies within their given ecosystem climbed to over 50%. Can you imagine the wasted money organizations spent due to poor planning, architecting, and implementation? What about the complete lack of value to the organization?
Before we begin architecting anything, we need to start with the business in mind first. Let’s start with the following two questions:
- What is the business outcome?
- What are we trying to solve?
Think Big, Start Small
In order to get started with a Zero Trust based program, we need to examine the answer to the two questions previously stated. In our case, the business outcome will be, “Creating a future proof business enabler and reducing technology complexity while providing gap free protection.”
Here are some considerations to think about prior getting into the weeds:
- Understand your existing processes and deficiencies
- Understand the risk and potential threats of what needs to be protected
- Understand your current technology stack
- Understand required capabilities, data and transaction flows
- Understand the end user impact and their requirements