Achieving Zero Trust Maturity with Cato SSE 360

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Trust is a serious issue facing enterprise architectures today. Legacy architectures are designed on implicit trust, which makes them vulnerable to modern-day attacks. A Zero Trust approach to security can remedy this risk, but transitioning isn’t always easy or inexpensive. CISA, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, suggests a five-pillar model to help guide organizations to zero trust maturity.

In this blog post, we discuss how Cato SSE 360 helps facilitate Zero Trust Maturity based on CISA’s model. To read a more in-depth and detailed review, read the white paper this blog post is based on, here.

What is Zero Trust?

Today’s Work-From-Anywhere (WFA) environment requires a paradigm shift away from the traditional perimeter-centric security model, which is based on implicit trust. But in modern architectures, there are no traditional perimeters and the threats are everywhere.

A Zero Trust Architecture replaces implicit trust with a per-session-based (explicit trust) model. This ensures adherence to key Zero Trust principles: secure communications from anywhere, dynamic policy access to resources, continuous monitoring and validation, segmentation, least privilege access and contextual automation.

Achieving Zero Trust Maturity with Cato SSE 360 | Download the White Paper

CISA Zero Trust Maturity and Cato SSE 360

Zero trust is a journey and the path to zero trust maturity is an incremental one. CISA’s Zero Trust Maturity Model helps enterprises measure this journey based on five pillars: Identity, Devices, Networks, Applications and Data.

Let’s examine the Cato SSE 360 approach to these.

Pillar 1 – Identity

The core of Zero Trust is ensuring user credentials are correctly and continuously verified, before granting access to resources. Cato SSE 360 leverages IdPs to enforce strict user identity criteria. Using TLS, identity and context are imported over LDAP or provisioned automatically via SCIM, and authorized users are continuously re-evaluated.

Pillar 2 – Devices

With zero trust, device risk is managed through Compliance Monitoring and Data Access Management. Validation includes all managed devices, IoT, mobile, servers, BYOD and other network devices. Cato SSE 360 combines Client Connectivity and Device Posture capabilities with 360-degree threat protection techniques to protect users, devices and resources. Cato has in-depth contextual awareness of users and devices for determining client connectivity criteria and device suitability for network access.

Pillar 3: Network/Environment

To achieve the zero trust principles of Network Segmentation, Threat Protection and Encryption, a new, dynamic architecture is required. Cato SSE 360 provides such a dynamic security architecture and the network infrastructure to achieve these principles. Cato delivers 360-degree security with FWaaS, IPS, SWG, CASB, DLP and NextGen Anti-Malware, while enforcing Zero Trust policies at the cloud edge. In addition, Cato SSE 360 enables micro-segmentation, provides modern encryption, and uses AI and Machine Learning to extend threat protection.

Pillar 4: Application Workloads

Wherever enterprise and cloud applications reside, the CISA Maturity Model dictates they receive Access Authorization, Threat Protection, and Accessibility. Cato SSE 360 ensures consistent access policy enforcement, regardless of the application location, user and device identity, or access method. Cato also provides threat hunting capabilities to extend security by identifying hidden threats to critical applications. 

Pillar 5 – Data

To protect data, access needs to be provided on the least privileged basis and data needs to be encrypted. Cato SSE 360 inspects and evaluates users and devices for risk. In addition, advanced threat protection for data is enabled with tools like CASB, IPS, NextGen Anti-malware, FWaaS and DLP.

Cross-pillar Mapping

Cato SSE 360 neatly wraps around the CISA model, delivering visibility, analytics and automation across all pillars to facilitate dynamic policy changes and enforcement, and enriched contextual data for accelerated threat response. 

Zero Trust Maturity with Cato

Cato SSE 360 facilitates zero trust with a cloud-native architecture that places user and device identity with global consistency at the center of its protection model. Cato SSE 360 controls and protects access to sites, mobile users, devices and enterprise and cloud resources, in compliance with Zero Trust principles. As a result, Cato’s approach to Zero Trust makes achieving Zero Trust Maturity easier for the modern enterprise.

To learn more, read the white paper.

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