Microsoft Zero Trust Deployment Center

Microsoft has released a Zero Trust Deployment Center for our customers to mature organization’s approach to security and optimize how Zero Trust is implemented.

A Zero Trust approach should extend throughout the entire digital estate and serve as an integrated security philosophy and end-to-end strategy. This is done by implementing Zero Trust controls and technologies across six foundational elements. Each of these is a source of signal, a control plane for enforcement, and a critical resource to be defended.

Zero Trust is a modern approach to Security which is based on the principle: never trust, always verify.

Follow the steps below on how to implement Zero Trust in your organization:

	Secure identity with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTIdentity Identities—whether they represent people, services, or IoT devices—define the Zero Trust control plane. When an identity attempts to access a resource, verify that identity with strong authentication, and ensure access is compliant and typical for that identity. Follow least privilege access principles.
	Secure endpoints with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTDevices Once an identity has been granted access to a resource, data can flow to a variety of different endpoints—from IoT devices to smartphones, BYOD to partner-managed devices, and on-premises workloads to cloud-hosted servers. This diversity creates a massive attack surface area. Monitor and enforce device health and compliance for secure access.
	Secure applications with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTApplications Applications and APIs provide the interface by which data is consumed. They may be legacy on-premises, lifted-and-shifted to cloud workloads, or modern SaaS applications. Apply controls and technologies to discover shadow IT, ensure appropriate in-app permissions, gate access based on real-time analytics, monitor for abnormal behavior, control user actions, and validate secure configuration options.
	Secure data with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTData Ultimately, security teams are protecting data. Where possible, data should remain safe even if it leaves the devices, apps, infrastructure, and networks the organization controls. Classify, label, and encrypt data, and restrict access based on those attributes.
	Secure infrastructure with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTInfrastructure Infrastructure—whether on-premises servers, cloud-based VMs, containers, or micro-services—represents a critical threat vector. Assess for version, configuration, and JIT access to harden defense. Use telemetry to detect attacks and anomalies, and automatically block and flag risky behavior and take protective actions.
	Secure networks with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTNetwork All data is ultimately accessed over network infrastructure. Networking controls can provide critical controls to enhance visibility and help prevent attackers from moving laterally across the network. Segment networks (and do deeper in-network micro-segmentation) and deploy real-time threat protection, end-to-end encryption, monitoring, and analytics.
	Visibility, automation, and orchestration with Zero Trust — https://aka.ms/ZTCrossPillars In our Zero Trust guides, we define the approach to implement an end-to-end Zero Trust methodology across identities, endpoints and devices, data, apps, infrastructure, and network. These activities increase your visibility, which gives you better data for making trust decisions. With each of these individual areas generating their own relevant alerts, we need an integrated capability to manage the resulting influx of data to better defend against threats and validate trust in a transaction.

With Zero Trust, we move away from a trust-by-default perspective to a trust-by-exception one. An integrated capability to automatically manage those exceptions and alerts is important so you can more easily find and detect threats, respond to them, and prevent or block undesired events across your organization.