Deloitte, a pioneer in global cybersecurity services, together with global CDN and cloud services provider Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) have established a strategic agreement to provide Zero Trust microsegmentation and incident response services to Deloitte clients globally. This partnership will integrate the Akamai Guardicore Segmentation solution with Deloitte’s cybersecurity, network forensics, and security expertise.

According to the companies, using this combination, enterprises in Latin America and other places have already benefited from instant protection against potentially devastating ransomware assaults.

Ransomware attacks are on the rise. The exploitation of zero-day and one-day vulnerabilities resulted in a 143% rise in ransomware victims between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023, according to a recent analysis from Akamai. This would emphasize how crucial it is to guarantee that businesses have the personnel and technology necessary to protect themselves from these escalating risks.

“Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has given our customers the most value out of all our incident response and network security products,” said Marcelo Diaz, a Cyber Risk Partner at Deloitte. “To cope with current breaches and stop lateral movement, Deloitte has been suggesting and implementing this solution for customers that need east-west network traffic security controls. In our most recent partnership at Cyber Icon Chile, we also got a ton of great feedback from customers. The alliance’s mutual advantages and team trust further improve customer experience and shorten time to value.”

Mani Sundaram, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Akamai’s Security Technology Group, said that “Enterprise clients continue to demand simpler ways to mitigate ransomware, get visibility into their network, and remain compliant. Deloitte’s comprehensive technical knowledge and concierge-style service solutions are ideal for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation. With less effort, costs, and complexity, customers may now meet their Zero Trust criteria thanks to our partnership.”

The Zero Trust Security Concept

The Akamai Guardicore Segmentation solution’s most popular client use cases include cloud migration, incident response, isolating environments, obtaining network visibility, implementing east-west traffic management, and more. Deloitte’s global teams have received full certification to implement and oversee this technology, which would help businesses maintain a Zero Trust posture. They have also shown to be a reliable friend in aiding customers in their difficult network breach recovery.

Customers of Deloitte may already use Akamai Guardicore Segmentation in their managed environments.

Zero Trust is a security concept centered on the belief that organizations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside their perimeters and instead must verify anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access. The strategy is used to protect modern digital environments by leveraging network segmentation, preventing lateral movement, providing Layer 7 threat prevention, and simplifying granular user-access control.

The main principles of Zero Trust include the following:

• Least Privilege Access – Granting users only the access they need to perform their job
• Microsegmentation – Dividing security perimeters into small zones to maintain separate access for separate parts of the network
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – Using multiple pieces of evidence to verify a user’s identity

Zero Trust is particularly effective in combating threats posed by both external and internal actors. It’s becoming increasingly relevant as organizations move towards cloud-based systems and remote work, which have expanded the traditional boundaries of enterprise networks.