Adopting Zero Trust to secure applications and data

This is a continuation of our Zero Trust blog series. In this article we will discuss securing application and data as two key digital components of modern working requirements.

Business processes, manufacturing lines, business as usual tasks and a huge number of other activities are all increasingly being accessed via applications residing in the cloud. Even when they reside within on-premises applications, all store or process  sensitive business or customer data.

Ensuring the right balance between productivity, access and protection of confidential data accessed via applications or Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is an important consideration for businesses.

Organisations also need to look at implementing an information protection strategy to identify and classify their information as a first step on the journey to secure their data. New technologies based on machine learning and automation of data labelling now allows businesses to secure data based on their business-defined policies.

The next step after classification and labelling is to gain a better understanding of the location and sensitivity of this data. It is important to ensure this data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, as well as remaining encrypted no matter where it resides (inside or outside of the business), with the only  decrypted access permitted by authorised users.

Businesses can take advantage of Zero Trust model to protect applications and data by:

• Gaining better visibility around the cloud applications and services being used
• Monitoring and identifying any abnormal behaviour
• Taking advantage of real-time analytics to restrict access
• Discovering and controlling shadow IT (sanctioned orun-sanctioned applications in the business outside the control of the IT department)
• Adapting access, control and preventing breaches based on changing risk profiles and real-time monitoring
• Defining information protection strategy to create label taxonomy and labelling policies as per business requirements
• Implementing Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies based on the applied sensitivity labels and content inspection to prevent data leakage and for tracking purposes
• Monitoring and controlling where data travels both inside and outside of organisation’s applications by using data labels

Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) and Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) provide a seamless and comprehensive solution for securing applications and data according to Zero Trust model principles.

Talk to Byte as Security Gold partner of Microsoft to assess your business security maturity, define the roadmap and work with you on adoption of this model to secure your organisation.

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