If you’re trying to secure your organization’s computer network from cyberattacks, traditional approaches may not work. Gone are the days when you could keep all your electronic assets inside a single building and construct a firewall between them and the wider internet. Now you have remote workers logging in from distant cities and cloud-based software applications running elsewhere in a data center. You’ve heard that your best bet for protecting all these far-flung assets is to create a zero trust architecture (ZTA), which assumes that no user or device can be trusted, regardless of its location or previous verification.So how do you start?Helping answer that question is the goal of newly finalized guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture (NIST Special Publication (SP) 1800-35) shows you how others have built ZTAs so that you can build your own. Developed through a project at the NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), the publication offers 19 example implementations of ZTAs built using commercial, off-the-shelf technologies. It also offers results and best practices from the 24 industry collaborators who participated in the project.“Switching from traditional protection to zero trust requires a lot of changes. You have to understand who’s accessing what resources and why,” said Alper Kerman, a NIST computer scientist and co-author of the publication. “Also, everyone’s network environments are different, so every ZTA is a custom build. It’s not always easy to find ZTA experts who can get you there.”Older approaches to network security rely on the idea of a perimeter, where once a device gains entry it can then freely access the network’s internal data, applications and other resources. This perimeter idea, developed when many networks were limited to a single location such as a building or campus, is growing obsolete. Nowadays a single organization may operate several internal networks, use cloud services, and allow for remote work — meaning there is no single perimeter.   READ MORE