Secure Overlay Architectures for Hybrid Enterprise Connectivity Using Zero-Trust Principles

Abstract

Enterprise computing has been radically changed towards cloud-based, hybrid, and distributed styles of architecture, which essentially highlight the incompetence of the traditional perimeter-based models of security, which are based on implicit trust inside the network boundaries. Zero-trust architectures address these vulnerabilities by abandoning the location-based assumptions of trust and imposing ongoing checks of identity, device posture, and contextual attributes to allow access to a given resource. Secure overlay architectures apply zero-trust to practice by using software-defined perimeters between authenticated users and authorized applications to provide logical isolation that lives regardless of the underlying network infrastructure. These frameworks apply application-level access controls and micro segmentation plans that prevent lateral movement and limit the effects of breaches to explicitly licensed resources. Organizations using zero-trust overlay networks have quantifiable security benefits, including significant decreases in successful attacks, accelerated threat identification and mitigation, and increased insight into access patterns across diverse infrastructure. The architecture does remarkably well in organizations that are in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, distributed workforce, and are seeking to mitigate attack surface as well as maintain the efficiency of operations. Zero-trust overlay architectures mark a crucial step forward from perimeter-centric approaches to identity-centric schemes that provide uniform protection irrespective of network location or infrastructure type.