Partner POV | How Okta, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler deliver end-to-end Zero Trust

This article was written and contributed by our partner, Okta.

Okta, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler have joined forces to deliver an integrated, best-of-breed Zero Trust solution that provides the cross-domain and context-driven security needed to withstand today's threats.

Beyond the Perimeter 2024, a virtual event that was held on April 9, 10, and 11, provided the opportunity for you to join experts from these three industry leaders as they discuss the pivotal role AI plays in cybersecurity and why best-of-breed integrations are the de-facto blueprint for a resilient, end-to-end Zero Trust architecture.

By watching, you'll:

• Hear from customers, in a fireside chat format, about their own experiences using best-in-class integrated solutions to improve security outcomes and increase operational efficiencies.
• Learn best practices for architecting your AI-powered Zero Trust transformation — including a complete view of key integrations and illustrative demonstrations.

Here's a bit of background information that underscores the importance of this three-way partnership.

Teaming up to tackle today's threats

Securing your users, endpoints, and applications against today's cyberthreats is hard enough in a steady state — but it's even more challenging when your organization:

• Is undergoing a digital transformation: changing architectures, introducing more SaaS applications, and consolidating tech stacks, etc.
• Depends on a distributed workforce: multiple locations, remote workers, managed and unmanaged devices, and a range of team members (e.g., full-time workers, contractors, partners, etc.)
• Faces resource constraints: IT and security personnel are already fully loaded, and economic uncertainty is putting the squeeze on operating budgets.

The old approaches — a long list of point tools or a single-vendor strategy — are impractical and ineffective in the modern risk environment.

Instead, it's time to implement security with speed and scale, using AI and specialized expertise from domain leaders to drive operational efficiency to reduce complexity, and — above all — safeguard organizations against the range of malicious actors and attack types that pose the greatest threats.

Okta, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler each contribute specialized expertise to the partnership, using shared telemetry and threat intelligence to create robust real-time defenses against modern threats

Key business outcomes

For organizations embarking on a Zero Trust journey or architecting a Zero Trust solution that makes the most of their current technology investments, the strong partnerships and pre-tested integrations between Okta, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler deliver meaningful benefits in three main areas:

• Prevention: Prevent compromises dynamically through Zero Trust application access controls aided by real-time sharing of threat intelligence and cross-domain telemetry
• Containment: Restrict lateral movement by enforcing Zero Trust policies across domains to safeguard against a host of modern threats, including credential compromise, zero-day malware, ransomware, and insider threats
• Response: Accelerate multi-domain threat detection and response through contextual telemetry sharing to promptly uncover, triage, and investigate incidents, leading to faster and more precise root-cause analysis and remediation

Domain expertise that no single provider can match

Choosing a pre-integrated solution from best-of-breed vendors provides greater simplicity, better security, and improved business agility than alternative paths:

• Point/siloed security tools target an area but often fail to integrate with other elements of the tech and security stack — leaving gaps that attackers exploit and imposing integration overhead on already-burdened security and IT teams.
• On top of restrictive and costly licensing, broader alternatives suffer from the infamous jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none deficiency, leaving many of the same security gaps as point utilities while lagging dangerously far behind the crucial innovations of leading-edge solutions.

In contrast, each of Okta, CrowdStrike, and Zcaler is a recognized leader in one of the three foundational pillars of a Zero Trust architecture: identities, endpoints, and applications.

Okta: User trust

Okta Workforce Identity Cloud centralizes Identity management with a context-based policy engine. Okta and CrowdStrike establish trust between users and devices, while Okta and Zscaler automate access restriction policies.

CrowdStrike: Endpoint security

The CrowdStrike Falcon platform provides advanced threat detection and rapid, automated response across the environment with additional contextual telemetry from Zscaler and Okta. Additionally, CrowdStrike shares device risk scores for real-time authentication with Okta and application access decisions with Zscaler.

Zscaler: Application access

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange provides threat prevention and enforces adaptive access control policies with user context from Okta and device posture context from CrowdStrike. CrowdStrike and Zscaler also bidirectionally share threat intel to reduce the attack surface and eliminate lateral movement.