How well do you sleep at night? Odds are you would sleep better if you could wake up to Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA). A true ZTA network makes incident response wake-up calls far less likely by shutting down data breaches, ransomware threats or any kind of unauthorised network access. It would also save your organisation at least £500,000 over a four-year period, making your security efforts much easier to advocate for. That’s the dream anyway.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. For the final week of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’re playing myth-busters and debunking three popular misconceptions about Zero Trust. Cyberthreats are becoming more and more brazen over time, and let’s face it—without a strong Zero Trust framework, your organization doesn’t have a dog in the fight.

Zero trust is a philosophy and practice all about securing data across your entire network. Zero trust means trust no one — authenticate everyone. Adopting this philosophy means your organization assumes that every single user, device and service that attempts to connect to its network is hostile until proven otherwise.

Over 18 months ago, a small group of us started a program to support the US federal government and the broader public sector with robust API security. Recognizing the major shifts in government cyber security, we focused on Zero Trust early. We wrote about it, talked about it, and evangelized on the importance of including API security in a ZT architecture. An early achievement was a detailed mapping of API security to the pillars of ZT over a year ago.

We need to shift how we as security practitioners break the barriers for collective threat awareness across identity touchpoints within cybersecurity. It’s become imperative that we gain the ability to continuously assess user risk with automatic response actions—a shift towards a unified, contextually-driven identity defense.

As cyber threats have grown in sophistication and frequency, a paradigm shift in security strategy has become imperative. This shift has given rise to the Zero Trust Security Framework, an approach that challenges the very foundation of trust in network security. User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) steps into the spotlight as a dynamic force that complements and enhances the Zero Trust Security framework. Let’s discover how UEBA can help organizations achieve zero trust security!

Zero Trust is a cybersecurity philosophy that rejects the idea of offering implicit trust to traffic based on network location. In other words, Zero Trust views all traffic as potentially malicious, regardless of whether it originates from a traditionally trusted network source, and therefore requires all traffic to be scrutinized to determine whether access should be granted to a specific resource.

Lock the doors inside your home, hand out keys sparingly, then turn on an alarm in every room. Your house will get a lot more secure. However, it will also become unlivable. Tight security policies, access conditions, and subnetting configurations can take away risk but even mature Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) environments must balance cybersecurity with usability.

“Just make us Zero Trust.” Hands up if you’ve ever heard some version of this statement. Gather ten cybersecurity pros in a room, and you’ll have ten frustrated people trying to implement Zero Trust Security Architecture (ZTA). Although boards and non-security executives often understand the ZTA security model at a high level and love the idea of an inherently secure network, security teams keep running into walls during implementation.

In an increasingly digital world where cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, organizations are embracing new strategies to protect their sensitive data and assets. One such approach that has gained prominence in recent years is Zero Trust. Zero Trust challenges the traditional perimeter-based security mindset and instead places a strong emphasis on identity as a cornerstone of a robust defense strategy.