Three services, one answer. Allow only what's needed. Whatever hasn't been approved — the program, the device, the connection — doesn't get through.
Most security spends its life deciding whether something is bad. That's an uphill battle. It means being right about every new attack, forever, and being right the first time. Zero trust asks a much easier question instead: was this approved? Anything that can't answer yes is denied, and a brand-new threat is just another thing nobody approved.
An attacker needs code to run, a device to work from, and somewhere to go. Take away any one of those and the attack stalls. Take away all three and there's very little left to work with.
Controls what is allowed to run. Only approved software executes, and each approved application is fenced in so a hijacked one still can't reach the files or the network it was hijacked for.
See how it worksControls which devices may reach your cloud tenants. A stolen password and a bypassed MFA prompt still don't open Microsoft 365, because the sign-in has to arrive from a device you approved.
See how it worksControls what can be reached. Internal systems stop listening to the internet entirely, so there's no open port to find, and access is granted per user, per device, per resource.
See how it worksThe clearest way to see what each service is for is to watch a normal intrusion try to get past all three.
Someone opens an attachment or runs an installer from a convincing lookalike site. This part is going to happen eventually — no amount of training makes a workforce perfect, and the good lures are genuinely good.
The payload isn't on the allowlist, so it doesn't execute — no signature required, because nothing was recognised in the first place. If the attacker instead abuses an approved application, its ringfence limits what that application can touch.
Say the credentials leaked some other way — a reused password, a token lifted from a browser. The sign-in still arrives from a device nobody approved, and that's the check it fails.
With a foothold on one machine, the usual next move is to scan for the file server and the domain controller. There's nothing listening to scan, and this user and device were never granted a path to either.
Something has to be recognised as malicious before it can be blocked, which hands every genuinely new attack a free first move. Deny-by-default doesn't need the introduction.
Speak with an expertThere's no all-or-nothing here. Book a walkthrough and we'll look at your environment and tell you which of the three closes the biggest gap first.
