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Security teams managing their organization’s security can be thought of as a small crew working to plug an infinite number of holes on a ship. It is challenging to gather the resources necessary to prevent all water from entering the boat. It's crucial to understand how to prioritize resources, so that the holes posing the greatest threat to the ship can be plugged.
This analogy aligns with the need for organizations to maintain a Zero Trust Architecture. As organizations adopt new technologies, their attack surface increases exponentially. But to get themselves up and running, they will often implement a bare minimum of security controls. This creates exposure to their established zero trust “protect surface,” and makes it more challenging for them to monitor and maintain their networks to ensure they can maximize their protection.
“Palo Alto Network’s Best Practice Assessment (BPA) measures your usage of our Next-Generation Firewall and Panorama™ security management capabilities across your deployment, enabling you to make adjustments that maximize your return on investment and strengthen security.”
Let's explore how using the Best Practice Assessment will help you monitor and maintain a Zero Trust architecture with Visibility, Control, and Enforcement across your organization.
One of the crucial pillars of Zero Trust, defined by John Kindervag, is the continuous inspection of traffic flows across your network along with an ongoing assessment of your security controls. The Palo Alto Networks Best Practice Assessment helps increase the effectiveness of validating policy configurations with comprehensive security health checks that ensure Zero Trust policies are maintained as networks evolve and change. The Best Practice Assessment Summary Dashboards provide high level snapshots of your configurations, while heatmaps help paint a more comprehensive picture.
The Best Practice Assessment can provide an evaluation of your adoption of Zero Trust policies across identified protect surfaces within your networks, and also your compliance with security configuration best practices as defined by various industry frameworks. This allows you to make informed decisions regarding the implementation of new security capabilities and adjustments to current policies and controls. To have this level of control is to simplify the process of staying up-to-date with security best practices (and your teams can focus on business initiatives).
Another key pillar of Zero Trust is the enforcement of access controls that ensures users can access only what they need to. The best Practice Assessment Helps you assess the current adoption of APP-ID, User-ID, and Content-ID across your organization so you can evaluate gaps in policy controls that may need to be closed to comply with your Zero Trust framework.