Zero Trust and the Future of the Workplace

There has never been a more challenging time managing cyber risk and responding to the challenges of an ever-changing business landscape than today. A recent Forrester report investigated new challenges modern enterprises face, like:

• A sharp increase in the number of remote workers and non-employee workers
• More types of users, non-human entities, devices, and data sources to protect and manage
• The steady migration of applications and workloads to diverse cloud hybrid infrastructures
• Cloud services with different identity models

… the list goes on. Responding to this increasingly complex dynamic, many organizations are looking toward a Zero Trust security model. You’ve probably heard the term “Zero Trust” thrown around but what does it mean, exactly? Put simply, Zero Trust dictates that no user should automatically be trusted, whether operating inside an organization’s network or out.

When most people think about trusting or securing “users” they think about human beings – employees, customers, partners, contractors, etc. However, users can also be non-human (think: devices, bots, service accounts, APIs, etc.). Over the past couple of years, we have seen a rapid increase in the volume and different types of non-human identities; this is important to note as organizations think about their identity and Zero Trust strategy.

In the past, organizations have often turned to access management or authentication (such as SSO or MFA) to help address Zero Trust. Although those are critical security components, SSO and MFA are not enough. Zero Trust requires a holistic security solution. And failure to implement a comprehensive identity and Zero Trust strategy, across not only human but non-human identities as well, can expose organizations to increased business, compliance, and security risks.

Forrester’s report, “Nonhuman Identities — And the Need To Secure Them — Are Growing,” dives into this topic much further, outlining how identity and access management practices must evolve to secure non-human identities with the same rigor previously applied to securing human identities. Download the Forrester report to better understand the security & operational challenges associated with non-human identities in the workforce and learn an effective identity strategy to manage and govern these advanced identity types.

Want to learn more? See why identity security is essential to Zero Trust here.