Back 
Organizations implementing zero trust network access (ZTNA) are reaping the benefits of empowering remote employees to access resources everywhere using any device, allowing them to stay productive no matter where they work. At the same time, these organizations are boosting their security posture by applying zero trust principles to protect their environments.
Organizations with a hybrid work strategy are bringing some workers back to the office, at least part of the time. According to Gartner, “by 2026, 75% of workers will continue to split time between home and traditional office locations.”* It is time to re-evaluate employee access at a broader scope.
In the legacy on-premises world, access was governed by IP addresses. When employees were physically connected on the corporate network, access controls were accomplished with VLAN, WLAN, ports, switches, and firewall rules. Some implemented network admission control (NAC) as a way to limit or block unmanaged devices from communicating with anything on the local network.
Legacy remote access VPN simply extends the concept by virtually placing the employees’ devices onto the corporate network. Because VPN sessions supply remote devices with IP addresses in the local network, the above controls apply here, too. But whether devices are local or remote, IP-based access control lacks the granularity many companies increasingly expect. Broad network access presents a potentially large attack surface.
When the pandemic first hit, organizations quickly realized that remote access VPNs couldn’t easily scale to accommodate the remote access needs of entire workforces that were going remote. Worse, as a public-facing service, VPN concentrators suffered attacks ranging from exploits, DDoS, and intrusion. As a result, organizations started to use cloud-based ZTNA to augment remote access VPN. As they gained familiarity with the tool, they realized improved scalability, flexibility, and security benefits, and began to replace remote access VPNs with ZTNA. Often, ZTNA projects can be the first implementation of an overall zero trust strategy.
Challenges of the hybrid work era
Now, fast forward to the modern hybrid work era, when employees are splitting time between home office (branch of one) and campus locations.
Infrastructure and security teams are discovering that it is not optimal to pay for and manage two sets of access control mechanisms, usually some combination ofZTNA for remote, and various network-based types for local. Multiple sets of policies with dissimilar formats make it challenging, if not impossible, to ensure a consistent enforcement and access experience. Additionally, a multitude of hardware appliances generating reams of logs and reports impedes visibility, making incident investigation difficult.
The security concern of too much access
The bigger worry is that on-premises users now potentially have too much access when they are on site. This poses a significant security concern, especially with coarsely segme