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5 Steps to Establishing a Zero Trust Foundation in the Cloud with Wiz

Written by Andy Williams | Nov 27, 2023 8:06:47 PM

In today’s evolving digital landscape, government agencies face an increasing number of cybersecurity threats. According to the GAO High Risk report, the Department of Defense has experienced over 12,000 cyber incidents since 2015. To combat these threats effectively, government agencies are adopting a Zero Trust strategy, which revolves around the idea that organizations should never automatically trust anyone or anything inside or outside their network. Instead, they should verify and validate the identity and security posture of every user, device, and application in their environment. Wiz helps government agencies gain visibility into their environment and its risk to enable a Zero Trust foundation in the cloud.  

These are the 5 critical steps that organizations should take to establish a Zero Trust foundation: 

Protecting Identities 

Agencies should strive to ensure that every identity in their environment follows the rules of least privilege, only having permissions to the resources it must access. With Wiz's Cloud Infrastructure and Entitlement Management (CIEM) capabilities, agencies can gain complete visibility into all identities and their permissions within their environment and view an inventory of all identities. Wiz helps agencies understand the effective permissions of each identity, making it possible to answer questions regarding which users have access to specific resources. In addition, Wiz enables agencies to identify high-privilege identities and admin permissions, so they can verify that permissions are scoped correctly and detect excessive permissions and identity misconfigurations. Additionally, Wiz helps identify lateral movement paths in the environment, enabling agencies to prevent potential threats. 

Protecting Devices 

Agencies need to have complete visibility into their cloud environment to effectively protect their resources. Wiz offers agentless scanning capabilities across virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions, providing a full inventory of every resource in the environment, with 100% visibility. Wiz's Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) capabilities identify misconfigurations in cloud resources and offer compliance assessments against industry standards and regulations. Wiz's agentless vulnerability scanning ensures that vulnerabilities in workloads are identified and provides actionable context to prioritize risk mitigation. 

Segmentation and Network Protection 

Agencies should segment their networks to reduce lateral movement and control attack vectors. Wiz helps monitor and enforce environment segregation with full network analysis of every resource in your environment. By analyzing network rules in various network management services, Wiz identifies exposed resources and cross-account network paths. This allows agencies to stay ahead of unintentional exposure risks and to quickly remediate any risks they find. 

Protecting Applications and Workloads with Wiz 

Wiz offers a unified approach to workload protection, from prevention to real-time detection and response. It provides visibility into all applications and workloads in the cloud environment, detects misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, secrets, identities, data, and malware. Agencies can integrate Wiz into their CI/CD pipelines to identify risks early in the development cycle and respond proactively.

Protecting Data in the Cloud with Wiz 

Data protection is paramount. Wiz helps agencies detect and monitor the location of sensitive data in their cloud environments. It continuously monitors for sensitive data across various data storage platforms, enabling agencies to understand who can access the data, how it's configured, and how it moves within the environment. Wiz alerts agencies when toxic combinations of risks create attack paths to sensitive data, allowing for quick remediation.  

As government agencies embrace a Zero Trust strategy, Wiz plays a crucial role in helping them establish a secure foundation that provides them with deep visibility and risk assessment. Learn more about Wiz for Government. If you prefer a live demo, contact us! We would love to connect with you.