If we have learned anything over the past year and a half, it’s that the world can change quickly. The business world has gone through a massive upheaval with the explosion of digital transformation initiatives and cloud adoption, which has created a wide array of new security concerns — most notably identity-based risks. Combine the fact that any identity can become privileged under certain circumstances with the massive number of human and machine identities being created across hybrid environments, and you’ve got an attack surface that is getting harder and harder to defend.
The acceleration of digital transformation has brought an end to the traditional network security perimeter. Instead, organizations rely on identity as a security barrier, with the need to implement a zero trust framework to reinforce this new perimeter. Zero trust is an approach that does not assume implicit trust on any corporate resources, no matter where they reside — in the cloud, from home, mobile, etc. — instead requiring that every identity reestablish trust for every session with a corporate resource. A recent survey found that 88% of security leaders say transitioning to a zero trust approach is “important” or “very important.”