Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!!

We are continuing discussing security related concepts and preparing study material for exam SC – 900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals

In last two articles

• Preparing exam SC – 900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals – Explaining few terms related to Security – Part 1 we discussed few terms related to Security
• Preparing exam SC – 900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals – Explaining defense in depth concept – Part 2 we discussed “defense in depth” concept

In this article we will discuss – Zero Trust model concept

Take away from this article

• What is Zero Trust model
• Zero Trust guiding principles
• Six Foundational pillars of Zero Trust model
• Building Zero Trust in our organization
• Reference to implementation of Zero Trust model in Microsoft

Zero Trust model

• Methodology which assumes breach and verifies each request considering it originated from untrusted / uncontrolled network
• The Zero Trust model operates on the principle of “trust no one, verify everything.”
• Even the requests from resources behind the firewalls of our corporate network, those are not trusted
• This also means that only user name and password is not sufficient to identify users but multifactor authentication is also there to have additional checks
• Neither giving direct complete access to the devices of users but only for specific apps or data which users needed

Zero Trust guiding principles

• Verify explicitly
  • Always authenticate and authorise user based on available data
  • Available data includes – user identity, location, device, service or workload, data classification
• Least privileged access
  • Limit user access with
    • just-in-time and just-enough-access (JIT / JEA)
    • risk based adaptive policies
    • data protection to protect data
• Assume breach
  • Use encryption to protect data
  • use analytics to get visibility
  • detect threats and improve security

Six Foundational pillars of Zero Trust model / Building Zero Trust in our organization

In our organization we could implement “Zero Trust model” by implementing / automating / enforcing security policies

• Identities
  • Users, Devices, Services
  • When any identity try to access resource, there should be very strong authentication mechanism
  • Strong multifactor authentication
  • Use of biometrics ensures strong authentication for user-backed identities – password less authentication
  • Least privilege access principal is followed
  • We need to ensure access is compliant and for the respective identity only
  • User, device, location, and behavior is analyzed in real time to determine risk and deliver ongoing protection

• Devices
  • Monitoring devices for health and compliances for secure access
  • End point threat detection is used to monitor device risk
• Applications
  • Finding all applications
  • Managing permissions and access
  • Ensuring appropriate app permissions
  • All apps are available using least privilege access with continuous verification
• Data
  • Should be classified, encrypted and labeled
  • Access should be restricted based on these above attributes

• Infrastructure
  • Threat vector – for more details about Threat Vector please have a look our first article – Preparing exam SC – 900 – Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals – Explaining few terms related to Security – Part 1
  • May be On-Premises, Cloud (VMs), Containers, Micro-Services
  • Use telemetry to detect attacks
  • Automatically block risky behavior and take protective action
  • Unauthorised deployments should be blocked and alerts should be triggered
• Networks
  • Real time threat protection, end-to-end encryption, monitoring and analytics should be employed
  • Network should be segmented – including micro segmentation

How Microsoft implemented Zero Trust model

please have a look at articles – Implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft – very nice article, must read once 🙂

Thanks for reading the article !!! Please feel free to discuss in case any issues / suggestions / thoughts / questions !!!

HAVE A GREAT TIME AHEAD !!! LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂