The castle wall as a ruin - away from perimeter protection to the Zero Trust model

Not only since the outbreak of the corona pandemic, which is forcing many people into the home office, has the physical IT infrastructure increasingly shifted towards cloud services. For some time now, traditional security concepts have therefore been under scrutiny, as employees increasingly need access to data and applications from outside the company walls. But how can this be done in a secure and user-friendly way?

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

The traditional permiet protection of IT architecture and data storage is often compared to a castle: It is difficult to penetrate over the moat and drawbridge, 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 once difficult to overcome castle walls suddenly appear as a ruin. Following the BYOD trend, employees are accessing corporate resources from home, from the café via hotspot or on the road with their business and private notebooks as well as tablets, smartphones and smart watches that are not VDI/Citrix compatible. It is now standard practice that all applications, information and data can be accessed anywhere, anytime. And neither IT security nor user comfort must be compromised in the process.

Trust no one - The zero-trust model

While traditional, "perimeter-based" protection relied on securing the enterprise perimeter, Zero-Trust's approach is to audit each data flow for trustworthiness, focusing on identifying users, devices, applications and services. Consequently, as the name implies, the principle is not to trust anyone. Regardless of whether applications and data are accessed from outside or inside the company's own network, all participating instances are authenticated accordingly. This paradigm shift has a major impact on the 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 help you

The practical implementation of the zero-trust model is a great 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: We are happy to support you from the investigation of the attack scenarios and your protection needs to the definition of the IT security architecture and project implementation.

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About the authors

Mario is Managing Partner at linkyard. He can look back on more than 20 years of experience in software development. Thanks to his further education he has a profound knowledge in the areas of Machine Learning & Data Science, Process Mining, Scala and Management.
In his career Mario has worked as CTO, Head of Business Unit, team leader, software architect, software engineer and head of nearshoring.
mario.siegenthaler@linkyard.ch

As a project manager, Selina has realized a large number of projects in the IT sector. Selina has further experience in dealing with public administrations, federal companies and the university system. Among other things, she has worked as a project manager, requirements manager or test manager.
selina.wuethrich@linkyard.ch