Today, collaborating with third-party vendors and consuming their services is common for several organisations and businesses to be competitive and deliver the best consumer experience.
Many enterprises work with third-party vendors to develop new technologies, outsource business functions, or deliver services. Thus, third-party entities can include a diverse range of people, including suppliers, contractors, technology partners, and resellers, who may require access to your company’s internal resources.
However, it’s important to note that around 60% of data breaches are associated with third-party entities. Thus, putting blind faith in your third-party partners isn’t the most secure and reliable solution.
So, how do you securely manage third-party access and prevent malicious breaches?
This article shares third-party access security risks and how you can prevent them with the Zero Trust Network design.
Third-party security risks
Third-party breaches occur when attackers take undue advantage of third-party vulnerabilities and exploit them to gain access to your network, applications, and business systems.
Third-party collaboration has many benefits, such as cost savings, leveraging external talent, talent recruiting, temporary project execution, examining possibilities and directions, and more.
However, without proper security policies in place, your company can face several third-party internet access risks. For example, you cannot ignore the possibility of third-party vendors stealing your company’s sensitive data once they access critical applications.
So, if you want to work together efficiently and ensure secure third-party access, building a Zero Trust Network model is the key.
Ensuring Secure Third-Party Access With Zero Trust Network Access
Zero Trust Network Access is a network security framework that works on the Zero Trust principle to minimise your enterprise network’s attack surface and ensure secure network access.
Zero Trust is based on the root principle of ”Never Trust, Always Verify,” requiring every user and device trying to access the network to undergo a strict authentication and authorisation process.
It creates encrypted and fast connections between third-party users and the servers and applications at the network layer to ensure maximum security.
Here’s how the Zero Trust Network model ensures maximum security and prevents data breach risks.
- Creates private and encrypted tunnels
The Zero Trust model creates secure, private, and encrypted tunnels from the third-party user devices to the network they wish to connect.
It enables seamless, secure, and encrypted third-party access, eliminating the risks of security attacks.
- Makes your network invisible
Besides third-party vendors, your company network need not be visible to the rest of the internet.
Zero Trust removes exposed IP addresses, making your enterprise network more secure and invisible to the internet.
- Ensures data integrity
With Zero Trust, your network traffic doesn’t go through the vendor machines.
Instead, the data transaction is end-to-end encrypted, ensuring maximum data security and reduced data breach risks.
- Enables continuous risk assessment
Zero Trust Network Access solutions enable complete trust and risk assessment for each third-party access request.
This continuous risk assessment help detects malicious activity and third-party risks easily and removes vulnerabilities in no time.
- Enables strict authentication
The Zero Trust framework trusts no user and denies network access by default to everyone unless they pass the authentication process.
Hence, it removes the excessive implicit trust and only grants access to authenticated, authorised, and verified users.
Conclusion
Employing a Zero Trust Network model is more than a necessity for today’s modern enterprises to enable secure, seamless, and robust third-party collaboration.
Suppose you want to prevent third-party breaches and ensure network security. In that case, I recommend you check InstaSafe solutions for your company and adopt their Zero Trust principles for maximum network security and protection.
