Building a great product means listening to what our customers need, and we’ve heard loud and clear from our customers that Zero Trust adoption is more important than ever. In the 2021 Zero Trust Adoption Report, we learned that 96% of security decision-makers state that Zero Trust is critical to their organization’s success, and 76% of organizations have at least started implementing a Zero Trust strategy. In the next couple years, Zero Trust strategy is expected to remain the top security priority and organizations anticipate increasing their investment.
Zero Trust adoption has been accelerated by the U.S. government as well. In May 2021, the White House signed an executive order calling for improvement to the nation’s cybersecurity, including advancing towards a Zero Trust architecture. More recently, the Office of Management and Budget released a draft federal strategy for moving towards Zero Trust architecture, with key goals to be achieved by 2024. Microsoft has published customer guidance and resources for meeting Executive Order objectives.
These government and industry imperatives create a huge opportunity for Microsoft and our partners to enhance support for our customers as they move towards an end-to-end Zero Trust security posture. At Microsoft, we strive to make it easy for partners, such as independent software vendors, to integrate with us so customers can easily adopt the most comprehensive security solutions. We recognize that customers take varied paths on their journey to Zero Trust and have multiple security solutions in their environment. When we work together to meet these needs, we build stronger protections for our companies and nations.
To support partner integration and Zero Trust readiness, we recently released partner integration guidance at our Zero Trust Guidance Center. This guidance is organized across the pillars of Zero Trust, supporting integrations across a wide variety of products and partners. Examples include:
- Integrating your solution with Azure Active Directory to share risk signals, increase customer trust, and support advanced solution scenarios.
- Using Microsoft Endpoint Manager APIs to ensure compliance on the devices employees are using.
- Enhancing customer visibility across their entire digital estate with integrations with Azure Sentinel.
We applaud those who are embracing a Zero Trust approach for security solutions. We will close out with a few examples of how ISV partners, F5 and Yubico, have benefited from this integration guidance in the Zero Trust Guidance Center.
F5 and Microsoft rescue a county from malware
Many companies rely line-of-business applications that were developed before adoption of the latest authentication protocols like SAML and OIDC. This means organization must manage multiple ways to authenticate users, which complicates user experience and increases costs.
BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) is F5’s access management proxy solution that centralizes access to apps, APIs and data. BIG-IP APM integrated with Microsoft Azure AD to provide conditional access to the BIG-IP APM user interface.
Last year, Durham County enhanced security across a hybrid environment with Azure AD and F5 BIG-IP APM in the wake of a serious cybersecurity incident. F5 BIG-IP APM gave employees the unified solution they needed to access legacy on-premises apps. F5 used Azure AD to apply security controls to all their apps, enforce multifactor authentication, and use finetuned policies based on circumstances like employee login location. In addition, self-service password reset powered by the solution reduced help desk calls for passwords by 80%.
Government of Nunavut turns to Yubico and Microsoft to build phishing resistance following ransomware attack
In 2019, the Canadian government of Nunavut experienced a spear phishing attack that took down critical IT resources for the territory. In the wake of the attack, protecting identities and applications was a top priority.
Together, Azure AD and YubiKey offered a solution that upgraded the security of the Government of Nunavut and fit their unique needs. The Government of Nunavut wanted to implement a phishing-resistant authentication solution. In addition, the government agencies used a variety of Windows-based systems, and, because of their remote locations, had inconsistent network access. To address these needs, they adopted YubiKeys, which are a hardware device that can be used for multi-factor authentication with no network, power source, or client software. You can read the full story from Yubico and learn more from the video below.
Learn more
We are incredibly proud of the work our partners are doing to provide customers with critical cybersecurity solutions using the principles of Zero Trust. Check out our newly published partner integration guidance for Zero Trust readiness to learn more about opportunities.
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