How to Apply Zero-Trust Principles to Strengthen Endpoint Security
How to Apply Zero-Trust Principles to Strengthen Endpoint Security
How to Apply Zero-Trust Principles to Strengthen Endpoint Security
In modern workplace environments, endpoints are more exposed to threats and become a larger attack surface, which increases security risk levels for organizations. Security and risk management leaders can use this research to extend zero-trust principles to endpoints and enhance workspace security.
Key Highlights:
To reduce this increased threat exposure and implicit trust on endpoints in modern work environments, security and risk management (SRM) leaders responsible for endpoint security should:
- Extend zero-trust principles to endpoints that access corporate resources by removing implicit trust
- Continuously verify the device, user, configuration and identity permissions to reduce the overall attack surface
- Provide limited access to resources securely on unmanaged devices by using technologies such as enterprise browsers and virtual desktop infrastructure(VDI)/desktop as a service (DaaS)
This research focuses on how to apply the zero-trust principles using various endpoint security and management technologies and tools. Use the three steps in Figure 1 to implement zero-trust principles on endpoint devices.
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How to Apply Zero-Trust Principles to Strengthen Endpoint Security
Zero trust is a security paradigm that replaces implicit trust with explicit trust by continuously assessing risk and trust levels, based on identity and context.
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The Absolute Platform
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
