The Operational and Business Benefits of Appgate’s Zero Trust Platform

Launch day is always a banner day for any technology provider as it opens the door to actively sell a new solution or service. Sure, you can take our word for it that our Zero Trust platform, now available to all, is easy to deploy, reduces administrative overhead and enhances access policies with rich security context via click-to-configure connections to third-party IT, security and business solutions. But isn’t it better to learn what our customers say are the operational and business benefits of our new platform?

First, let’s talk about the challenges that most IT and security teams face when deploying a new security solution:

• Infrastructure and security efforts are often spread across multiple teams
• Deploying software for production frequently can take weeks
• Security context is stuck in silos, which means integrating any new solution or service adds more time to launch plans
• Post-deployment management is a huge burden

Customer-identified benefits of the Zero Trust platform

Of course, it was imperative we build a platform that easily overcomes the challenges of new tech deployment. So, during beta and preview phases, we turned to a “power user” group of our enterprise customers to provide invaluable feedback and keep us honest. As product management team lead, it was a personal pleasure working directly with this group as they tested and identified the top three operational and business benefits of Appgate’s Zero Trust platform and built-in risk engine:

1. Faster deployment

   In many organizations, deploying security solutions at enterprise scale can take weeks or months to fully roll out, leaving resources open to potential attacks. Our preview customers were quick to point out that the Zero Trust platform dramatically reduces initial deployment times.

   With a single click, a security team can easily deploy the Appgate SDP control plane in about 20 minutes. Then, using the cloud-based SDP Admin user interface, they define security policies and quickly deploy policy enforcement points (Gateways and Connectors) close to the resources. In fact, work with our preview group proved that an SDP Collective can be operationally effective in a single day.

2. Smarter policies

   Appgate SDP, which fuels our platform and is the industry’s leading Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution, is well regarded for its powerful dynamic policy engine that continuously analyzes user and device claims to determine whether to grant or block access to resources. Now, thanks to the platform’s risk engine, additional security context from third-party services, such as CrowdStrike, is available via simple, click-to-configure risk data integrations.

   Our preview customers elevated this benefit because the risk engine service eliminates the traditional need for custom scripts or API-level integrations by automatically connecting to external providers to analyze their data and produce one or more risk scores. In-house SDP admins can now enrich security policies and entitlement conditions in seconds due to the platform’s out-of-the-box “no code” integrations (managed and maintained by Appgate) with leading security tools.

3. Simplified operations

   Overtasked and understaffed security teams want to stop managing infrastructure and simply just manage policies. Our Zero Trust platform addresses this need by offering cloud-delivered Appgate SDP Collectives, which shift the burden of monitoring, operating and upgrading to our cloud team.

   It is important to point out that cloud-delivered Collectives do not require cloud-routed data traffic. This means customers retain the scale and performance benefits of Appgate SDP’s capabilities without losing the freedom to choose where policy enforcement points such as Gateways and Connectors are deployed. Based on the feedback of our preview customers, there is significant interest in switching from self-hosted to cloud-delivered.

In summary, our Zero Trust platform speeds Appgate SDP deployment with a unique as-a-service approach that retains customer control of network traffic and reduces infrastructure management overhead. In addition, it offers:

• Customer choice of implementation models: Extending value-added services for self-hosted or Appgate-hosted deployments
• Fast-tracked Appgate SDP delivery: With a single button click, deploy the industry-leading ZTNA solution in minutes
• Smarter policy decisions: Use security and endpoint system telemetry to dynamically define risk-based rules for more granular policies  
• Maximized security investments: Break down silos between security, IT and business systems by building an interoperable, cohesive Zero Trust ecosystem  
• Simplified day-to-day operations: Offload administrative management, monitoring and upgrading tasks for operators with as a service delivery and a shared responsibility model

I invite you to learn more about our Zero Trust platform and risk engine and how to reduce complexity for your admins, engineers and operators by visiting this webpage or downloading the data sheet.

Additional Zero Trust access resources

eBook: Zero Trust Maturity Roadmap
Solution brief: Zero Trust Access for Corporate Networks
Blog: Cybersecurity is a Board-Level Business Issue