Most organizations will struggle to implement and securely manage zero-trust environments, due to the many challenges involved, without the adoption of Symmetrium’s Virtual Mobile Device solution.
The traditional perimeter of organizational networks has been obliterated by the rise of remote work and SaaS services, forcing the implementation of zero-trust environments. This is necessary to cope with the unprecedented growth in endpoints and data sources operating beyond the confines of the traditional organizational network.
Zero trust provides a more comprehensive approach to security than traditional methods. The core principle of zero trust is to trust nothing and verify everything. This means that all users, devices, apps, software and data both inside the network and outside must be verified and protected. Organizations can therefore, in principal, mitigate the attack surface nefarious actors target to steal data, compromise passwords and other malicious activities.
Problems Implementing Zero Trust
Many of the associated challenges to implementing a true zero-trust environment are linked to the hybrid work culture, which has become a significant obstacle in securing this model. With more employees working outside the boundaries of the corporate network, using their own devices to connect to sensitive business data, security vulnerabilities have spiked.
The use of non-secured mobile devices has resulted in an entire stack of identities and end-points that require a full set of resources to continuously secure, protect and manage it. This requires mapping how users and their devices access and interact with sensitive data. Solutions focus on managing these users and devices to help increase cyber resiliency and remote access.
Zero Trust’s Fundamental Flaw
This exposes a fundamental flaw in their approach — a focus on users and devices, and not on data. So once users are granted access the data they access using their mobile comes to rest on that device. Thus the data is no longer in the secure confines of the corporate network environment and is exposed and vulnerable on the device it is now residing on.
Security will always be maximized when there is no data at rest and therefore no data at risk. This is how Symmetrium, a zero-trust data mobile access solution, enables productive collaboration while dramatically minimizing the risk of data breaches. It achieves this by turning any mobile device, managed or unmanaged, into a virtual extension of an organization’s network, with all its compliance, security, and IT.
The Only True Zero-Trust Approach
Using Symmetrium means organizations don’t have to ditch and replace technology to implement a secure zero-trust environment. This is because Symmetrium creates virtual mobile devices (VMDs) that sit protected within the perimeter of an organization’s network and therefore adheres to all existing enterprise network security protocols.
These VMDs use P2P encrypted streaming to allow authorized remote and third party users to view data using their own devices. This view-only data never leaves the protected organizational network and therefore is never transferred to an external device. This ensures the data at all times remains secure and never comes to rest on external devices.
With zero trust now vital for organizations to survive digital transformation it is critical to overcome the associated challenges. In a world where data, resources and employees are outside the enterprise perimeter, the only true zero-trust approach is to ensure “no data at rest” and Symmetrium’s VMDs are the perfect solution to make this happen.
