Achieving Zero Trust in Modern Cloud Access

The Challenges

Zero trust is a security approach that assumes that anyone requesting access could pose a potential threat, regardless of whether the request comes from inside or outside the network. Trust needs to be established and continuously validated across the technological ecosystem. 

Historically, zero trust for cloud identities is done with context-based policies around authentication. While continuous verification through authentication can support the zero trust and least-privileged access approach, this still leaves gaps in security, especially in cloud-native or hybrid environments: 

• Static access and permissions still exist. Legacy PAM and other identity solutions don’t separate authentication and authorization, which means compromised credentials can be used to access sensitive data and systems. 
• Legacy PAM and other identity systems often lack the granularity needed for zero trust, which requires control over who can access what resources, when, and under what circumstances. 
• Traditional PAM and identity management approaches also struggle to integrate with cloud-native technologies and multi-cloud environments, leading to significant access delays, especially if they’re dependent on manual processes. 

Decoupling Authentication and Authorization for Short-Lived Access

Britive’s cloud-native privileged access management platform separate authentication and authorization. We eliminate the risks caused by static and overprivileged access and bring security closer to zero trust and least privileged access. 

Outcomes

Flexible, Scalable Identity and Access Control 

• Britive separates authentication from authorization, which means that users don’t inherently have access upon logging in. This allows for fine-grained access control, provisioning only the permissions needed for a given task or project. 

Secure, Short-Lived Access Provisioning 

• Permissions managed through Britive’s platform are always short-lived, meaning that they only exist when they’re requested and automatically expire after a set period of time. 

Support for All Cloud Identities 

• Britive’s ephemeral, just-in-time (JIT) technology manages both human and non-human identities. This means that end-users, service accounts, and other automations all have temporary, controlled access to the environment.