The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Germany has just released a groundbreaking publication on Zero Trust, advocating a comprehensive security approach in response to the increased need for connectivity driven by remote work, cloud services, and BYOD concepts.
Key Aspects of Zero Trust:
The BSI emphasizes three crucial aspects of Zero Trust:
- Adaptation to Increased Connectivity: The traditional perimeter security faces challenges due to the rising demand for connectivity from home offices, clouds, and BYOD concepts. Zero Trust presents a modern, holistic approach to secure internal and external accesses, considering all entities within an IT infrastructure.
- Essential Principles:
- Authentication and authorization for every access to any resource.
- Adherence to the Least Privilege Principle for all entities.
- Thorough logging, monitoring, and analysis of all activities, with immediate countermeasures if necessary.
Seven Steps to Implement Zero Trust:
- Identify and Prioritize Organizational Business Processes: A detailed understanding and prioritization of business processes are vital, with a focus on integrating Zero Trust into each process.
- Identify All Involved Parties within the Organization: Determine organizational units involved in business processes, laying the foundation for access decisions.
- Consider Legal Influences: Identify laws, regulations, or other legal influences that might impact the implementation and sequence of measures.
- Identify Involved Resources: Derive involved resources, especially data, systems, and applications, from the elaborated business processes.
- Formulate Security Policies: Develop security policies framing the interaction of entities, permissions, and resources, independent of technical implementation.
- Market Exploration: A comprehensive exploration of the market for suitable products is necessary, considering that existing products may not cover all Zero Trust functions.
- Prioritize Implementation: Prioritize measures that sustainably contribute to the Zero Trust model by providing fundamental functionalities.