Exploring the Principles of Zero Trust and SASE
The importance of cybersecurity for organizations is undeniable, as there is ever-growing concern around data integrity, user privacy and overall vulnerability. As cyber threats and data breaches continue to increase in frequency and complexity, implemented security measures need to be regularly assessed and improved. That is where Zero Trust and SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) come in, two largely complementary approaches with a set of guidelines and principles that aims to protect businesses from cyber-attacks.
What is Zero Trust?
Zero Trust is an information security concept that assumes all users and devices, even those already within the company’s perimeter, are always potentially untrusted. Instead of putting complete trust in the established corporate networks, Zero Trust requires personalized and secure access to all the relevant data and resources.
The main principles of Zero Trust are:
- Always verify: All requestors must be authenticated and authorized, no matter their location, device or identity.
- Limit your attack surface: By limiting access to only the necessary resources and eliminating vulnerable legacy networks or systems.
- Continuously monitor and audit: Establish real-time monitoring of all activities related to access, and review regularly.
What is SASE?
SASE, short for Secure Access Service Edge, is an approach to providing network and security services using a single platform. It integrates multiple security functions such as secure web gateway, next-generation firewall, cloud access security broker, zero trust and VPN, among others, into a platform.
In general, SASE focuses mainly on:
- Rise of cloud-based applications: Solutions should cover the growing prevalence of cloud applications, requiring a consistent and secure approach to the cloud.
- Flexible authentication: Adapting on-premises authentication solutions to provide a more secure and efficient solution for users connecting from anywhere
- Network performance: Reducing latency and eliminating roadblocks for traffic routing rules, independent of user locations.
- Unified policy management: Applying global policies across the entire enterprise, and the ability to deploy and control security settings
The combination of these two approaches, Zero Trust and SASE, can be used to improve the security and resilience of an organization, by implementing the relevant measures in line with the principles mentioned above. Ultimately, both approaches help to protect the digital and physical assets of a business without impeding users or devices, providing a unified strategy to stay safe and secure.