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The need for “Zero Trust” today is no longer the same as what we talked about years ago when the term was first coined. Back then, businesses only had a handful of remote workers signing in to the corporate network. The common wisdom of the day dictated that you couldn’t implicitly trust the authentication of those remote users any longer because they weren’t on the company LAN and the common solution was installing two-factor authentication.
Things have changed since then. The actual definition of zero trust today is much broader than the idea of going from “zero” to “full trust.” It’s more than just not trusting authentication because the user isn’t on your network any longer. You also can’t trust the devices they’re running. You can’t trust the applications they’re using. And you can’t trust the network they’re traversing.
There are many more potential trust risks today too. There are also many more real threats—the FBI saw a 400% increase in cyberattacks seeking to exploit new opportunities in the first few months of the pandemic. But at the same time, there is also a much higher demand for official business being done outside the organization. In 2021, the percentage of remote employees is expected to double, and nearly three-fourths (74%) of companies plan to permanently shift workers to work from home after the pandemic ends.
Despite the implicit “zero,” zero trust can’t be an all-or-nothing proposition. If the business cannot authenticate the user, then that user cannot be given access to company resources. If the majority of the workforce is working from home, using their own devices, applications, and home networks—literal enforcement of zero trust would effectively translate to “zero work gets done.” This is why any useful evolution of zero trust principles must include data protection.
Brave new world, brand new problems for protecting data
Organizations are moving ever-increasing amounts of data out into the