Zero Trust Architecture: A Comprehensive Approach to Incident Response Management

Abstract

Zero Trust Architecture is a modern security strategy that is based on the principle of “never trust, always verify”. This approach to security eliminates trust from an organization’s network architecture and focuses on managing enterprise risk management practice throughout the four phases: identification, assessment, response, and monitoring and reporting. Incident response refers to an organization’s processes and technologies for detecting and responding to cyberthreats, security breaches or cyberattacks. An effective incident response plan can help cybersecurity teams detect and contain cyberthreats and restore affected systems faster, reducing the lost revenue, regulatory fines and other costs associated with these threats. Zero Trust architecture can be aligned with the four general categories of risk response strategies: tolerate, operate, monitor, and improve. By design, telemetry, state information, and risk assessment from threat protection feed into the Zero Trust policy engine to enable automatic response to threats. In this paper, we present a comprehensive approach to incident response management using Zero Trust Architecture. We discuss the key principles of Zero Trust Architecture and how it can be applied to incident response management to improve an organization’s overall security posture.