Netskope has been blogging about Zero Trust recently, and it’s apparent that security programs based on Zero Trust principles undoubtedly help to lower risk within organizations. With all that’s going on in the world right now, you might not be spending much time thinking about Zero Trust. But there is an application of Zero Trust that is relevant to the current international crisis, and that’s Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA.
As you can imagine, working remotely has been made a top priority within organizations over the past few weeks. Unfortunately the limitations of ‘traditional’ remote access VPN solutions are being exposed when put under the pressure of a tsunami of home workers.
The limitations of remote access VPNs were a focus area for the Cybersecurity Insiders (CSI) report that Netskope commissioned last month, the results of which you can view here. Respondents highlighted that access to their private applications in public cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, and Azure was a specific pain point, with access to apps in other locations also posing some challenges…
When it comes to securing access to private apps, where’s your biggest challenge today?
In an effort to provide access to applications hosted in the public cloud, organizations are coming up with high risk strategies. Some survey respondents (31%) confessed to exposing their private applications publicly on the Internet so that remote workers could access them.
When it comes to lowering the risk from malicious insiders, or cybercriminals with stolen credentials, gaining remote access to an organization’s networks, Zero Trust Network Access really is the way forward. And when delivered in the cloud using a high-capacity global network infrastructure, it can enable remote access that scales to meet the needs of any dramatic increase in remote working requirements.
Put simply, ZTNA overcomes the challenges of traditional remote access VPNs, and can be consolidated with other cloud-based security capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) for those organizations on a journey towards a SASE infrastructure. In fact, 77% of CSI survey respondents understood the value of consolidating ZTNA with other cloud-based security services.
Most of the value that a consolidated cloud-based solution offers is centred on the security and enablement of an organization’s remote workers. For that reason, there has never been a better time to get to grips with the principles of Zero Trust, understand how other organizations are using it, and begin your own Zero Trust journey.
