Retour 
In many conversations I have with security and infrastructure leaders, the discussion inevitably turns toward a zero trust project either already underway or set to begin soon. More often than not, this conversation is specifically about zero trust network access (ZTNA), because ZTNA technology has been frequently positioned as the solution for something every team really wants to achieve right now: total replacement of remote access VPNs.
Here’s the complication, though: modern cloud-delivered ZTNA can not be bolted onto a legacy infrastructure, thus it is not a rip and replace-VPN-replacement. For example, in a recent conversation I learned that a CIO’s company employs roughly 1200 call center workers as part of their globally distributed enterprise. Those call center workers still use a legacy on-premises hosted VoIP product.
The CIO explained that his team understands that upgrading to ZTNA is a phased approach that requires modernizing the broader application infrastructure and having a plan to upgrade VoIP to the modern UCaaS. However, that upgrade isn’t scheduled for another two years. In the meantime, they need to maintain a small fleet of VPN infrastructure, which is not ideal. This is not an uncommon scenario.
Fortunately, there’s now a better way to ZTNA.
Today, Netskope is proud to announce ZTNA Next, which will help organizations achieve true full VPN retirement and meet the promise of modernizing technology infrastructure using ZTNA.
Let’s look at why this is a game-changer for a problem almost all security and I&O teams will tackle in the next few years.
Meeting the Promise of Full VPN Retirement
ZTNA is here to stay. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of remote access use cases will be replaced by ZTNA. What’s interesting to note in Gartner’s description is the phrase “use cases.” As with the CIO I mentioned above, ZTNA is intended to be a worthwhile option for many use cases, including VPN replacement. But if some individual VPN replacement use cases are supported by ZTNA and others are not, that ZTNA product is only a partial solution to a full problem.
Let’s take a step back, though. Are all organizations looking to replace VPN? In a word, yes. During the pandemic remote work accelerated, and forward-thinking organizations saw an opportunity to replace legacy remote access VPNs with modern, efficient technology. These legacy VPNs overcomplicate infrastructure and are a hassle for IT teams to manage. Crucially, they are also major security risks because of how vulnerable they are. For example, CVE lists 645 disclosed vulnerabilities related to VPN, 71 of which were disclosed just in 2022. With a variety of remote endpoints accessing networks worldwide, legacy remote access solutions like VPNs unquestionably expand the digital attack surface. For example, our research team leveraged publicly available data to identify more than a quarter of a million instances of publicly exposed infrastructure hosting SSL VPN software and services, worldwide, from just one VPN technology provider. Security teams already know VPNs are vulnerable. But it remains a struggle for enterprises to fully replace this legacy remote access technology with something they can be confident will do the job for all relevant use cases.