For many organizations, Cloud Computing and the use of Cloud applications is the new norm. Employees are accessing their email and files while on the road--using both personal and business devices--because the Cloud makes data available from anywhere there is an internet connection. At the same time, organizations are falling victim to high-profile data breaches, exposing employee and customer personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI) data. This data is now being used by hackers in account takeover attacks, phishing schemes and more. This means that the same Cloud applications giving employees the freedom to work and access company data from anywhere now pose a problem for traditional security techniques.

Employee identities are the new security perimeter of any business. According to the Verizon Mobile Security Index 2018 Report, 89% of organizations are relying on just a single security strategy to keep their mobile networks safe. And with Gartner predicting worldwide security spending reaching $96B this year, up 8% from 2017, it's evident enterprises must adopt a more vigilant, focused strategy for protecting every threat surface and access point of their companies. IT security strategies based on trusted and untrusted domains are being rendered insufficient as hackers camouflage their attacks through compromised, privileged credentials. It's happening so often that eight in ten breaches are now the result of compromised employee identities.

Bottom Line: Zero Trust Security (ZTS) starts with Next-Gen Access (NGA). Capitalizing on machine learning technology to enable NGA is essential in achieving user adoption, scalability, and agility in securing applications, devices, endpoints, and infrastructure. Zero Trust Security provides digital businesses with the security strategy they need to keep growing by scaling across each new perimeter and endpoint created as a result of growth. ZTS in the context of Next-Gen Access is built on four main pillars: (1) verify the user, (2) validate their device, (3) limit access and privilege, and (4) learn and adapt. The fourth pillar heavily relies on machine learning to discover risky user behavior and apply for conditional access without impacting user experience by looking for contextual and behavior patterns in access data.

Bottom Line: By enabling enterprises to scale security with user behavior-based, contextual intelligence, Next-Gen Access strategies are delivering Zero Trust Security (ZTS) enterprise-wide, enabling the fastest companies to keep growing strong. Every digital business is facing a security paradox today created by their proliferating amount of applications, endpoints and infrastructure on the one hand and the need to scale enterprise security without reducing the quality of user experiences on the other. Businesses face a continual series of challenges to growth, the majority of which are scale-based. Scaling security takes a multidimensional approach that accurately interprets user behavior, risk and threat predictions, and assesses data use and access patterns. Security defies simple, scale-based solutions because its processes are ingrained in many different systems across a company. Each of the many systems security relies on and protects have their cadence, speed, and scale.