In today’s increasingly digital, globalized business environment, enterprise access entitlements and data security needs demand a policy-driven approach to automate and secure access to many diverse applications, data stores, systems, and topologies. These applications run on servers, desktops, laptops, mobile devices – both online, offline, and on the Internet as software services. Therefore, custom built authorization and entitlement solutions that only provide static and role-based policy evaluation for a specific application no longer have the required capability and reach to meet current cybersecurity requirements. This is where a zero-trust policy engine comes in. A zero-trust policy engine allows your organization to adapt to the ever-changing needs of today’s business requirement by providing the flexibility to make changes to access rights and data security needs on the fly via policy without complex customization and manual procedures.

A policy engine is an essential component of the Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA), which has gained popularity in recent years as a security model that trusts no user or device by default. In a Zero-Trust environment, security policies are based on the principle of least privilege, where users and devices are only granted access to the resources, they need to perform their duties. The Policy Engine works hand in hand with Zero-Trust policy management (ZTPM) to enforce policy and grant access to the enterprise resources. ZTPM involves defining and enforcing policies that ensure access to sensitive data and critical systems is only granted to authorized users and devices. ZTPM also includes the creation, enforcement, and continuous monitoring of access policies, as well as interfacing with the identity and access management (IAM) systems.