Zero Trust, the cybersecurity framework that encourages organizations to continuously verify users and trust no-one, is “here to stay”, Google Cloud’s Director of Product management for Zero Trust has told Expert Insights.
Tim Knudsen, the Director for Product Management at Google Cloud, told Expert Insights in a recent interview that he believes that the core Zero Trust principles are “here to stay.” Google Cloud has been a driving force for Zero Trust in the cybersecurity for the past several years through their BeyondCorp Enterprise solution, and Google has been adhering to the Zero Trust approach for over a decade.
The ideal of Zero Trust – a term first coined by Forrester analyst John Kindervag in 2010 – has rapidly gathered momentum as one of the biggest cybersecurity trends over the past couple of years. But the topic can be difficult to define, with many vendors claiming the Zero Trust mantle for their solutions.
At its basic core, Zero Trust is a simple concept, as Knudsen told Expert Insights: “Trust nothing, verify everything.” Although many solutions claim they can ‘do’ Zero Trust, “An important nuance,” he says, is that Zero Trust is a “set of principles,” rather than a product itself.
These principles are here to stay, as they enable more secure access, particularly for remote and hybrid workforces. Knudsen told Expert Insights: “By taking a Zero Trust approach, organizations are able to shift access controls from the network perimeter to individual users and devices, allowing the entire workforce to work more securely from any location and limiting access to only the apps and resources workers need.”
On the future of Zero Trust, Knudsen told Expert Insights: “Of course, our products will grow and change to support the latest landscape, but the fundamental tenets of Zero Trust should prevail. Furthermore, I think if we look at the work the current Administration [in the United States] is doing to mandate Zero Trust, we can see this approach will set the strategy for years to come.”
When asked how Google sees the concept of Zero Trust evolving, Knudsen said, “At Google, we’ve already started to evolve this approach to production workload environments, encompassing the way software is conceived, produced, managed, and interacts with other software…Just as a user’s credentials can be captured by bad actors, software that interacts with the larger world needs protection on many levels.” Google calls this approach BeyondProd.
While the importance of Zero Trust cannot be overlooked, there is no “magic switch,” Knudsen says. His final advice for organizations looking to implement Zero Trust is that, “Planning is paramount.”
“Implementing Zero Trust is not just about a product roadmap; it’s also about identifying use cases and prioritizing your deployment. We recommend customers first take stock of what is currently being accessed so they can identify what needs to be secured most urgently.”
You can read the full Expert Insights Q&A with Tim Kundsen here.
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