You make yourself a really good sandwich for lunch at work. You keep it in the refrigerator in the morning. By lunchtime, you find half of it eaten, and yes, it is maddening. Starting the next day, you place a strong note to scare coworkers into not taking it. Well, we know that scary notes won't work with sandwiches. You can lock it up in a box with a lock with a physical PIN only you know. However, people can guess PINs and passwords, so that also won't work.
To cut to the chase, notes and PINs won't work with your data either. A strong password can secure your data, but with threats like brute-force attacks, it can't really reduce the risks. You need more. That's why you need to set up conditions to evaluate others before you give anyone access to the data. Again, why the conditions? You need to ensure that even the entities you know don't get to your data without your permission.
To zoom in further, a conditional access mechanism evaluates conditions closely before granting an access request. What conditions? They include the user's identity, location, device health, and compliance. It considers risk factors, too.
How exactly does a conditional access mechanism do all the evaluation and verification? It involves several stages that begin with evaluation and use the Zero Trust approach every step of the way until access is finally granted. Convert Download
As mentioned before, a conditional access mechanism takes multiple steps to ensure that only authorized requests to access your data are granted. Here's how conditional access works, step by step:
When an access request is sent, its contextual factors, or signals, are evaluated, These factors include:
Here, the conditional access mechanism checks if the user making the access request is who they claim to be. Quite like how we get ourselves verified when signing in at work or accessing our bank accounts, the request is verified using multi-factor authentication (MFA), multi-step authentication, or other methods.
Here, the device used to access the resource is checked based on its security status. Even if it's mildly vulnerable, it can be attacked, and you don't want your organization going to the grave with that device in the event of a data breach. Well, that's why you keep tabs on devices, too.
The conditional access mechanism examines where the request is coming from. Access is usually blocked for places where no employee from your organization works or stays to ensure the request comes from the right place at the right time.
Staying awake at 3am might be normal for you, but an access request at 3am is a big no. Why would any employee want to access their organization's data outside their work hours, unless the employee or someone pretending to be them wants to exploit the data? Keeping access blocked outside of business hours is essential. Even if it is requested at a seemingly normal time, the conditional access mechanism checks it because the time zone differs with the location .
The evaluation box is ticked. Now, here's where it's better to be safe than sorry. Don't even think about sorry; the hackers will pass through your doors, and the legal guys will knock on them until all financial hell breaks loose. That's a Netflix show you don't want to be the main character of. Quite an exaggeration, but it's a possibility. Avoid this by creating and applying policies specific to your organization's needs. Here are some policies you can use to avoid being sorry:
MFA can be uptight and extra for all the right reasons. It requires users to provide two or more verification methods, keeping all the doors to your resources in check.
The device from which a request is sent must be secured, too, to avoid any sort of data breach or malware. You might like sharing your coffee with a friend, but if one of you is sick, the other is bound to catch the sickness as well. "That makes two of us" isn't a good idea here, especially when granting access to a vulnerable device. That's why your policies must require the devices to meet compliance standards before granting access. Is better safe than sorry ringing any bells here?
As mentioned previously, doing the location check for requests is a must, and to implement this, you can make use of location-based policies. These restrict or allow access based on the geographic or network location from which an access request originates. This is another way that the Zero Trust approach does its job in security.
Here are other ways you can apply and implement policies specific to your organization's needs:
There's always the what-if moment—and not for good reasons. Especially with cybersecurity, that is a moment we can't afford to ignore. We know Zero Trust aims to avoid any such moments; a conditional access mechanism makes use of Zero Trust in ways mentioned earlier, and adaptive authentication is the cherry on top here, again enforcing Zero Trust to keep threats at bay.
The cherry on top here is the additional layer where further authentication methods are required based on the examined security level. This often involves MFA, and for high-risk scenarios, additional steps are needed. Some additional methods include context-aware MFA and step-up authentication.
For instance, when a user transfers a large amount of money, adaptive authentication might trigger additional verification steps. These could include a biometric scan (like fingerprint or facial recognition) or a one-time password sent to a registered device. Call it extra all you want, but it ensures you don't give hackers a chance to pass through your doors or give the legal guys a chance to knock on them as a result of noncompliance or a data breach.
With Zero Trust in the loop now, you can't trust devices either. Given that, integrating device management into conditional access ensures that only security-compliant devices are allowed to access your organization's resources. The integration typically involves compliance checks and mobile device management (MDM) solutions.
Compliance checks verify that the devices (the sources of requests) adhere to organizational security policies, such as having up-to-date antivirus software. MDM solutions help you avoid any what-if situations by allowing administrators to manage and secure devices remotely.
Just because an access or authentication request is approved once doesn't mean the source is always secure. Your resources can still be exploited at any time after the verification, and with that in mind, you should continuously monitor the requests and user activities. You can do so with session monitoring and real-time policy updates to keep all eyes on the activities and respond to suspicious ones ASAP.
Now that continuous monitoring is in place, you need to keep in mind granular control with respect to conditional access policies. Quite like the saying the devil's in the details, with respect to potential data breaches, you can let them happen because of big picture thinking only, but the tiniest details make up the big picture, which is why you need to take granular control over your policies.
With conditional access allowing you to have that control, you can tailor measures to your organization's specific needs and risk profile. To elaborate, here are some ways you can leverage granular control:
Different applications have different purposes, and for that reason, they can trigger distinct conditional access policies, enabling organizations to apply different levels of security based on the sensitivity of the application. For instance, you don't need MFA to Google which coffee can help you sleep at night , but you need it to approve the credit card change to buy that decaf.
Your organization has different roles for different responsibilities, implying that their permission levels are not to be the same either. With conditional access policies, you can target specific users or groups, allowing for differentiated controls based on roles, responsibilities, or risk levels.
With these controls, you can set conditions based on user actions or session details. For instance, a policy might require MFA for certain high-risk actions such as installing new software or transferring a large amount of data. Speaking of the latter, data deserves the high-profile treatment just like money when a large amount is transferred.
We have covered all the evaluation, policies, controls, and integrations.. Why the reporting now? Well, to start with, compliance and threat detection requires it. Apart from the legal reasons, you need analytics and reporting to dig into details about every single activity going on in the organization. The analytics can help you understand security incidents, respond accordingly, and strengthen your policies.
Here's how conditional access incorporates reporting and analytics :
These track changes and activities with respect to your policies and provide detailed records on them. For instance, to evaluate policies for high-risk scenarios, you need to know if MFA, context-aware MFA, or another authentication method was implemented for such scenarios. You do this to understand security incidents and your policies better. Also, you get records of who created, updated, evaluated, or deleted policies. This helps you identify and study security incidents, like mentioned before.
This focuses on examining user risks and sign-in risks. It involves evaluating user behavior, device compliance, and locations to assign risk levels to sign-ins. This allows you to automate responses to potential threats by implementing extra measures like MFA or blocking access altogether. With risk analytics, not only are you avoiding potential risks, you're also saving time and effort with automation—a lot of time.
With these, you can get a visual, analytical overview of how effective your conditional access policies have been. The workbooks can show the impact of individual or combined policies on user sign-ins, helping you understand their efficiency and their necessity in the future. This also allows for troubleshooting, analyzing trends, and testing new policies in report-only mode.
These are a huge part of monitoring conditional access policy changes in real time, and here's why: While audit logs capture events, they do not automatically notify admins. If you're an admin, you can understand why that's a pain point; a lack of immediate notifications can slow down responses to threats. To address this, you should set up alerts to receive notifications about policy changes or suspicious activities.
Now that the reporting and analytics are done, too, you know how conditional access works and you're good to go with it now. It's quite an elaborate process,but all the extras and in-depth controls ensure that your organization's security is as rigid as tungsten.
