Modern businesses rely heavily on contractors and third-party users to perform specialized tasks. These remote workers typically have overprivileged access and use unmanaged devices, posing risks to the network.
ZTNA helps reduce these risks by connecting these external users through a secure tunnel to the applications they need. However, robust universal ZTNA solutions must also support unmanaged devices and users.
Authentication
Authentication is the first step in any Zero Trust network access deployment. IT teams can use ZTNA products to secure remote work by requiring users to verify their identity to an access broker directly connecting them to specific internal applications. The broker can be deployed as software or an appliance on-premises, as a service in the cloud, or both. The identity verification process checks the user’s credentials to ensure they are authorized, and it also verifies the device and connection context to see if any red flags are present.
As organizations prioritize cybersecurity in an increasingly interconnected landscape, understanding the benefits of ZTNA becomes essential, offering enhanced security measures by validating every user and device before granting access to resources, thereby minimizing potential risks.
Once the user is deemed authenticated and the device and connection are trusted, the access broker checks to ensure that policies and permissions allow only what is required for the application to function. These policies can be created using roles designed to match a person’s role in the organization, and they can include factors like time of day or geographic location. Zero Trust networks also assess every new flow a person makes to ensure it is valid because the environment can change between flows, and no single flow should be assumed to be safe from attack.
Another core benefit of a zero-trust architecture is that it conceals infrastructure by hiding applications from public discovery and bridging connections to them without connecting to the network. This allows IT to create perimeters around applications, which helps to limit threat movement in the event of a breach.
Access Control
With granular access policies enforced by zero trust, network, device, and application security mechanisms are deployed to protect business applications. These include multi-factor authentication, visibility into devices and users, secure APIs, and firewalls to safeguard sensitive data and minimize cyberattack exposure.
Zero trust networks prevent third-party risk by ensuring external users never gain network access. Additionally, they bolster internal users’ confidence by ensuring that only authorized users can access required apps, minimizing the likelihood of a successful lateral threat move. This approach also helps reduce integration time and the need to manage overlapping IPs.
A zero-trust security solution can also protect cloud assets, reducing the need to rely on private connections and avoiding issues such as latency, data leakage, and performance degradation. Additionally, it can help reduce the risk of distributed denial of service attacks by restricting internet exposure to high-value applications.
Lastly, zero trust networks can replace and terminal services by providing identity-based access to resources over the bare internet. This helps companies improve flexibility, agility, and scalability by compartmentalizing apps into their micro-environments and reducing the attack surface area. This also makes it easier to comply with regulations such as those related to data confidentiality and protection. Moreover, it allows businesses to monitor their digital ecosystems and detect suspicious activities, including unauthorized data intrusion or malware.
Network Health Monitoring
Many security solutions rely on network visibility to detect potential threats. ZTNA goes further with network health monitoring by checking the integrity of devices that connect to applications. This helps protect against malware code and other insider threats often missed by traditional cybersecurity solutions.
In addition to device assessment, ZTNA can include risk and security posture as a factor in access decisions (both agent-based and service-based). This can be done by running software on devices to check the status of hardware and operating systems or by analyzing traffic to and from the device. When used with configuration management tools, admins can see the complete picture of the network and its connections before making changes.
As a cloud solution, ZTNA makes it easy for organizations to scale capacity without deploying and managing more appliances or gateway servers. This reduces deployment and maintenance costs and enables IT to quickly implement a zero-trust strategy for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It also eliminates the need for complex network segmentation, allowing IT to secure applications with simple, centralized policies applied to users across all devices. This unified view of application access helps to ensure that the proper access privileges are granted using context evaluations that consider device, location, and time of day.
Reporting
Zero trust networks replace the traditional firewall-based network perimeter with a new dynamic and more secure boundary. A ZTNA solution uses identity- and context-based access, hiding applications from discovery and providing granular permissions through a trusted broker that verifies user identities. This enables a higher level of security while simplifying how users connect to applications.
With digital transformation and remote work transforming the workplace, ensuring your employees can easily and securely connect to the applications they need to do their jobs is more critical than ever. While VPNs offer a convenient solution to secure application access, they have significant limitations that leave businesses vulnerable to attack.
VPNs are not designed to detect malware that resides on devices and can compromise the entire network. With BYOD and IoT becoming commonplace, this is an increasing threat to your business. Zero trust solutions eliminate this problem by separating device access from network access, ensuring that malware-compromised devices cannot reach your network to infect other devices or steal data.
Zero trust technologies also provide a more comprehensive approach to security with granular access, micro-segmentation, and integration of device health into access policies. This translates to better protection for your employees by removing lateral movement risks and limiting access based on their devices’ risk posture.
