Information technology is full of many things, and we’ve got no shortage of buzzwords. Everyone has heard of AI and ML by now, I am sure. Another one gaining a lot of traction? Zero Trust Network Security. Like I said, we in IT love our buzzwords, and ZTNS (or ZTNA, with the “a” for access) is no different.

But what if you have zero idea about Zero Trust? How do you find out if you need it, why you would need it, how you can deploy it and what to do in order to maintain it?

See, it can be a lot. That “zero” in Zero Trust does not mean no effort involved, that’s for sure.

So, let’s take things one by one…there won’t be zero effort, but we can at least make it a bit easier to tackle.

To start, what organizations are most often linked to Zero Trust? Typically, government organizations, healthcare, oil and gas and financial industries are leveraging this more and more. If you are in one of these verticals, you probably are looking at ZTNS already. Of course, if you are not in one of those verticals, that does not prevent you from going down this path either.

Why should any organization be considering a Zero Trust approach?
When it comes to remote access, VPN is the way to go, right? Well…it used to be.
Or…we can just shove everything in the Cloud, right? Not really.
Enter Zero Trust.

With a traditional VPN, your organization gave you an account, and you’d have to dial in or launch an application, which would then connect you to your corporate network and give you all the access you would typically have. For some staff that is fine…but what if you have vendors and contractors who need remote access to only a small sliver of your infrastructure?

VPN access could sometimes be split up to restrict access, but Zero Trust takes it to a whole new level.
With VPN access, you could have a limited degree of access control, but in my experience that wasn’t really a scalable solution. For example, in a past life, I deployed a VPN where, based on users, they got a certain IP pool. We could then determine what access based on an ACL. But, that was tricky and it was a small organization. Imagine trying that for a company significantly larger, and you can understand the headaches.

Zero trust does not just open a door to your network, like the VPN would. Zero trust first authenticates the user, and then once authenticated, it grants the user access only to the specific application or system they need access to.

There’s a lot less risk there. If someone compromised a privileged user’s VPN account, they would have access to everything. ZTNS limits the impact considerably.

Effectively, you will only open up access once a user is authenticated,  and only to the system they need access to, and are authorized for. It helps eliminate those stories we’ve heard of an instance where a company was compromised because someone had access to something they didn’t need to, and an attacker jumped from one system to another with ease.

Right up front, if you are an organization that has no staff to handle this, or staff that wants to handle this but cannot? WiFi Training can help. We provide the training, and there are also engineers able to assist in deploying this within your environment. After such an engagement you can be sure that your team is well-trained to maintain your ZTNS deployment, and that your deployment is well-executed.

And, if you are an organization that has a handle on the needs, but needs a bit of help and training? Again, that is right in our wheelhouse.

With ZT, as with IT in general, there is no single answer, nor any one solution. There are a plethora of offerings from all the big names in networking and security, and our team will work with your team to ensure a great deployment with whatever solution you’ve identified.

And when it is all said and done, your C team can sleep a little easier knowing that your organization has successfully deployed a great Zero Trust Network Security solution, assisted by a world-class team, who also made sure your staff is well prepared to support and maintain the systems moving forward.