Why Zero Trust And Identity Will Be Top Priorities In 2022?

As the technology landscape continues to advance day by day, the number of digital threats also grows with online attacks becoming more complex as threat offenders take advantage of innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to carry out attacks. Cyber attacks using artificial intelligence make it urgent for enterprises to raise their level of IT, security, risk, and compliance needed to battle against such cyber security risks.

This growing threat level is also forcing business organizations and enterprises to focus on advanced measures for cyber security protection that can integrate their business processes, systems, and services – in their entirety.

In fact, cyber-security risk is an important issue to business organizations and is sensitive to the governance and management of business data as well as customer privacy. Thus, tech leaders and company management, as a whole, find themselves having increased responsibilities to be well-prepared and prevent cyber attacks. As a result, managers need to learn more about safety and risk, as well as dive deeper into the company’s security preparedness level.

Moreover, business organizations must have practical measures of protection in place, as well as cyber security organizations’ security insurance coverage appropriately. To this end, managers need to have a clear understanding of the company’s cyber security position when dealing with new and changing methods that attackers use to compromise systems on every level.

Cybersecurity Will Always Be A Top Priority For Businesses

According to a report by the Infosys Knowledge Institute, today, the majority of management teams in organizations are involved in discussions about a cybersecurity protection strategy. Given the growing importance of cyber security, among the primary topics would be zero trust and identity.

Why Zero-Trust is Essential?

The importance of zero trust was also emphasized in the various studies and reports by the agency which essentially requires business organizations to define a zero-trust architecture and create a plan for its implementation in 2022.

Read our previous blog post to learn more about zero trust.

In its simplest sense, Zero Trust is a security framework that helps identify, authenticate, and authenticate all users and devices before granting access to an organization’s resources and assets. When it comes to cyber security, authorization is an important aspect that defines who the users are and whether they are really who they say they are as well as whether the organization knows such users and can give them access to specific company resources and assets, and what they can do with them.

When the user completes their required task, their credentials are removed, the authentication is also removed, and the user returns to a “zero-trust” state in the eye of an organization’s system. In fact, this could practically be the only way for organizations to be proactive when it comes to cyber-attack prevention and preparation. As a result, identity has become another critical piece of the complete cyber security landscape, together with cybersecurity and risk management.

Identity is essential for any company and/or business organization, including those who still rely on legacy systems or already operate on the latest cloud technologies. Being able to effectively battle against the growing threat of cyberspace requires technology, processes, and architectural changes.

Large enterprises and other private business organizations – which believe they have adequate cybersecurity and information systems protection – may still have to take a second look at all the work needed to support the zero-trust security practices.

Zero-Trust Practices Require Investment And Support

The goal of any for-profit business organization is to ensure maximum revenue growth and adequate return on investment to shareholders. New products and services which require a cloud-ready infrastructure are needed to take advantage of new business opportunities. Here, identity management is necessary to achieve these initiatives and also to mitigate any cyber security risks related. In fact, secure and confidential access to the cloud and other services may need zero trust and identity.

Yet, many companies are still operating on silos systems, and do not yet have all of the necessary applications fully integrated for efficient identity access and protection. Thus, any organization needs to pay attention to this specific problem which leaves them vulnerable.

As is often the case, the governing body may not seem to notice this particular issue and leaving many business-critical applications vulnerable to attacks by not integrating them into the central access management solution.

If left unmanaged, things can be left astray and organizations will lack full visibility into their level of security. Companies can state that they have adopted the zero-trust framework, but if they only use less than 50% of the entire organization, is it really zero-trust? This can have a detrimental effect on the organization.

Cybersecurity And Business Objectives Need To Be Aligned

It is difficult to see why so many management teams have not taken strong action on cybersecurity as a top business priority. Business organizations may have heard about many cyber security solutions, and have probably held discussions among security leaders about the effectiveness of many solutions. However, tech leaders and other decision-makers may still need specialized information to understand why cybersecurity with zero trust requires investment as well as focus.

With more and more security breaches being reported each month, teach leaders and business managers to understand that their organizations won’t be immune to the security threat. Unfortunately, many organizations only choose to respond once a new attack happens. They must always take an active position to keep their business as safe as possible.

Security protection should be a priority for businesses and it can be a problem if the technology leader is not actively helping the business build a strong position in the landscape of cybersecurity. Many underfunded cybersecurity efforts use technology that fails to meet the goals and priorities of business cyber security.

With the right tools and knowledge, technical leaders and management teams can play a key role in promoting the full adoption of critical cyber security practices such as zero-trust, identity management, and privileged access.