A Joint Venture allows 2 unrelated companies to share resources, ownership in a new special purpose entity. For cost reasons you might want the new JV to have access to partial resources of one or more of the parent entities. Users might have permissions in both the JV and the parent organisation. How does one achieve this? A mesh of VPN’s? A new Identity system? These seem likely to lead to heart ache and security woes. Business needs to be fast and efficient. Starting a new JV we should not have to worry about who can login to what. What’s the best approach? A Joint Venture with Zero Trust.
First, we need a Federated Identity system. Don’t create new accounts and logins. Instead, create a new Federated Identity system which allows for a user to be working for one of the parents, or the other of the parents, or the JV directly. Make no differentiation in ease of use nor security nor access.
Second, we need a means of authorising access to the resource. Zero Trust Network Architecture allows us to treat resources in isolation. Make no differentiation in ease of use nor security nor access for any resource, regardless of which of the 3 entities “owns” it. A Joint Venture with Zero Trust allows authorisation regardless resource or user location or ownership.
Don’t hire a firewall or a VPN to do the job, they are not fit for purpose. They have a time and a place. But not here.
Once achieved, we can a la carte build the team and tools that will make the Joint Venture successful. And, in the unlikely event the Joint Venture fails and needs to be wound up, its trivial to disconnect. Fast to start and try, fast to fail if needed. This is what continuous is all about. Joint Venture, Zero Trust.