Modern organizations require the ability to connect employees and applications from anywhere work securely happens—whether it’s their home, airport lounge, or corner cafe. ZTNA provides that solution.
It also makes it easier to comply with security regulations by verifying the identity of users and devices and enforcing strict access policies.
Improved Security
Zero trust security requires rigorous identity verification for users and devices before allowing them to connect to a network. This “never trust, always verify” approach is more effective than traditional security methods.
ZTNA also minimizes the impact of account breaches by preventing attackers from moving around the organization after compromising an individual user account. It also helps meet regulatory compliance requirements by safeguarding data through strict access protocols.
As organizations adapt to a dynamic cybersecurity landscape, exploring innovative solutions is critical; understanding the benefits of ZTNA, or Zero Trust Network Access, is crucial for establishing secure and flexible access controls in today’s interconnected digital environments.
Unlike VPN, which cloaks the entire network and its applications from end-user devices, zero-trust networking enables secure point-to-point connectivity between specific enterprise applications and authorized users over the bare internet. It also allows a seamless, productive end-user experience, even over a WAN connection.
The core of a zero-trust solution is an IPSec-based connection broker that authenticates the device and the user and assesses the security posture before granting access. This is achieved through user identity and device identification, multi-factor authentication, behavioral analytics (e.g., new device, out of radius, possible travel, untrusted IP or compromised email address), and threat intelligence feeds.
The connection broker can be deployed as an appliance or server, a virtual machine (VM) or container, and provided as a cloud service. It can be unified with a vast area network (WAN) to form a secure access service edge (SASE) solution.
Enhanced Visibility
Zero trust eliminates the traditional security perimeter and focuses on securing individual applications and their users. By requiring authentication and verification before accessing data, ZTNA prevents unauthorized intrusion while reducing the attack surface. This is especially important as many businesses transition to multi-cloud environments.
Unlike legacy systems, which are plagued by multiple logins and slow speeds, ZTNA provides a seamless, user-friendly experience. This makes it easier for remote employees to collaborate with their colleagues while working from home or a coffee shop.
The Zero Trust security model also reduces the risk of insider threats, as it requires least-privilege access for every session and closes visibility gaps that make it hard to track activity. This, in turn, limits the damage that an insider could cause and protects the company’s reputation.
A Zero Trust solution also provides greater network observability, allowing administrators to see traffic patterns and identify anomalous behavior in real-time. This helps them spot attacks early and quickly respond to mitigate damage.
In addition, a Zero Trust platform can secure SaaS and cloud applications as part of its inline data path, thereby improving application security. It uses a unified security service edge (SASE) framework, including secure access control, granular context-aware policy, and micro-segmentation capabilities. To help protect against phishing attacks, it also uses dynamic ports to filter traffic and encrypts sessions with SASE’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules.
Easier Management
Modern organizations must connect users, workloads, and applications, even when those resources don’t reside on the network. ZTNA gives them a secure, fast, scalable way to do so.
ZTNA products and services create a software-defined perimeter, or SDP, by authenticating a user against a trusted broker before connecting them to specific apps. The broker can be deployed as an appliance, in a data center, or as a cloud-based service.
The broker determines whether to allow or deny a connection request based on preestablished access policies and contextual variables like device security posture, time of day, geolocation, and data sensitivity. It can also take granular action, such as limiting access to only specific applications or blocking activity, such as URLs accessed and SSH commands executed.
Because it’s delivered as a service, ZTNA minimizes deployment hassle and ongoing maintenance by reducing the need for appliances and centralized management. With ZTNA, IT teams can begin with a pilot use case built around a small subset of users and applications and work out any kinks in the deployment process. They can then scale up the use case as they get familiar with it and move into production as needed. This approach enables enterprises to deliver the productivity benefits of zero trust to all employees, regardless of location or device.
More Scalable
Modern ZTNA solutions leverage a private backbone to enable direct connections to cloud and internet destinations. They provide a more secure, high-performance experience than traditional VPN solutions, eliminating the need to backhaul data across public infrastructure and reducing the need for multiple segregated environments. SASE combines ZTNA with a full suite of security and network services to deliver a highly scalable, easy-to-manage solution that provides performance, visibility, and protection.
Unlike firewalls based on network segmentation and block access to applications, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) eliminates these boundaries by connecting to a specific application through a trusted broker. The broker authenticates the user and their device and then enables or denies network access based on pre-established policies. The broker can also monitor traffic for suspicious contexts that could prompt an access decision, such as times of day, geolocations, and data sensitivity.
With most organizations now relying on remote work, ZTNA can be deployed as a service to allow users access to the network regardless of where they are physically located or what device they use. This model also allows for easier management as the responsibility of network security moves to a cloud-based provider, eliminating the need to install and manage agents on each user’s device. Choosing a provider experienced in building a ZTNA deployment that integrates with an organization’s existing operational framework is essential for a seamless transition.
