The castle wall as a ruin - away from perimeter protection towards a zero trust model

Not just since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, which is forcing numerous people to work from home, the physical IT infrastructure is increasingly shifting towards cloud services. Traditional security concepts have therefore been under scrutiny for a long time, as employees from outside the company walls increasingly need access to data and applications. But how should this be made possible in a secure and user-friendly way?

The castle wall as a ruin - When perimeter protection becomes ineffective

The traditional tenant protection of IT architecture and data storage is often compared to a castle: Intrusion via the moat and drawbridge is difficult, but once you have overcome the castle walls, you can move relatively freely within the corporate network. With the increased use of cloud services and the need to access them from anywhere at any time with different clients, the castle wall, which was once difficult to overcome, suddenly appears as a ruin. Following the BYOD trend, employees access corporate resources from home, from a café via hotspot or on the go with their business and private notebooks as well as with tablets, smartphones and smartwatches that are not VDI/Citrix compatible. It is now standard practice that all applications, information and data can be accessed anywhere and at any time. And in doing so, neither IT security nor user comfort must be compromised.

Trust No One — The Zero Trust Model

While traditional, “perimeter-based” protection focused on securing the corporate border, Zero-Trust takes the approach of verifying the trustworthiness of every data flow and thus focuses on identifying users, devices, applications, and services. As a result, as the name suggests, the principle is not to trust anyone. Regardless of whether applications and data are accessed from outside or within the own network, all participating instances are authenticated accordingly. This paradigm shift has a major impact on IT security architecture and presents it with new challenges. This is because all areas of IT are affected by the zero-trust approach and must be expanded accordingly.

More IT security - we can help you with that

The practical implementation of the zero trust model is a major challenge for every company. With our experience (large companies >6000 clients and highly complex IT infrastructures), we can provide you with comprehensive advice in this area: From identifying attack scenarios and your protection needs to defining the IT security architecture and project implementation.

--

About the authors

mario is a managing partner at linkyard. He can look back on over 20 years of experience in software development and, thanks to his continuing education, has in-depth knowledge in the areas of machine learning & data science, process mining, scale and management.
In his career, Mario worked as CTO, Head of Business Unit, Team Leader, Software Architect, Software Engineer and Head of Nearshoring.
‍mario.siegenthaler@linkyard.ch

As project manager, Selina implemented a variety of projects in the IT sector. Selina has further experience in dealing with public administrations, federally affiliated companies and the higher education sector. Among other things, she worked as a project manager, requirements manager or test manager.
selina.wuethrich@linkyard.ch