Making the Case for Universal Zero Trust Network Access

During pandemic shutdowns, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) quickly replaced unwieldy VPNs that couldn’t secure fully remote workforces, while NACs, private WANs and LANs likely lay dormant. Now as the remote vs. return to office debate rages on, enterprise network security teams should have their own debate over continuing to juggle disparate legacy solutions or extending the control of comprehensive ZTNA that simply secures access for ALL users and resources.

This common sense move to one secure access platform means less hands-on admin time for IT teams, enhanced network monitoring and a better user experience whether your global teams are at headquarters, in a branch office or working remotely. So, if you’re hesitating because you think ZTNA is a remote access-only solution, think again.

How we got here

To be fair, the meteoric rise of ZTNA can be partly attributed to the remote access use case as vendors capitalized on the WFH shift and organizations sought more secure VPN alternatives that could scale faster and better than legacy VPNs. However, this drove the assumption that ZTNA is a one-trick pony.

Granted, not all ZTNA vendors are created equal, especially when it comes to securing on-premises and legacy applications. But real universal Zero Trust access solutions deliver control and security across all hybrid enterprise use cases for on-prem or remote employees and third-party contractors accessing your resources. Case in point ... the Nemertes Driving Value Through ZTNA study reports that multiple use cases are driving accelerated Zero Trust access adoption across a wide range of industries.

Contextual access control for enterprise networks

At its core, Zero Trust access is about the principle of least privilege and gaining trust through validation using contextual, attribute-based policies that are much more granular than the implicit trust approach of legacy solutions. It’s all about knowing who's doing what, when, where, why and how on the entire enterprise network backed by wide-ranging monitoring and visibility analytics.

Let’s take contextual access in regard to user location, for instance. This is a policy model attribute that should be used to determine authentication levels based on different scenarios. For instance, maybe a user can’t see certain resources if they are remote. Or maybe if they are in a certain country, some data gets obfuscated due to compliance and residency requirements.

In terms of on-premises, moving to a café-style network secured by Zero Trust access dramatically simplifies firewall rules to essentially become “access is only granted if it’s coming through a Zero Trust policy enforcement point (PEP).” This is a game-changer for network security teams because overly complex firewalls are likely full of shadow policies no longer needed or actively used which leaves ports open and exposes the network to risks.

With universal ZTNA, you can create extremely granular policies that have specific termination times or are restricted based on location for greater access control to all resources. Not to mention, Zero Trust policies can be expressed in plain language like, “all people in the finance group in our directory system are allowed to access applications tagged finance.” Even better? Clear, dynamic policies mean that down the road the right finance group users have automatic access to properly labeled resources as tags update or new applications are introduced.

This is the beauty of universal Zero Trust access policies. They deliver a more comprehensive policy language for expressing rules at both the identity and network levels, which simplifies the process by relying on attributes or groups.

In a recent webinar Shift Toward Zero Trust Access Everywhere, featured guest and Forrester senior analyst Carlos Rivera, put it this way. “Regardless, you're going to have some sort of complexity when it comes to your overall architecture. The idea here is more about the control. ‘What control do I have as the owner of my enterprise or the security personnel on my enterprise? What control do I have and what means do I have to make sure that I'm securing my architecture, but also enabling business in the same process?’”

So, if you follow the contextual-based principles of Zero Trust security, it’s all about securely controlling access for all users to all resources regardless of location. That’s why universal ZTNA is rapidly being applied to a multitude of sophisticated use cases across multifaceted enterprise networks with a single unified policy engine.

Universal ZTNA designed for complex enterprise networks

Forward-thinking organizations and security leaders with complex environments, strict security requirements and intricate network topologies require flexibility, control and extensibility when building Zero Trust architectures.

Appgate SDP, the industry’s most comprehensive universal Zero Trust access solution, was designed to secure your whole environment and it can be configured to meet your exacting security and compliance requirements regardless of network topology or complexity. Without compromising your standards, it delivers:

• Flexibility to design and deploy Zero Trust access on your terms, whether consumed and delivered as-a-service or self-hosted in the environment of your choice 
• Control in how your network traffic and data is routed without mandating it traverse a vendor's cloud environment 
• Extensibility to break down siloes by interoperating with your security, IT and business systems while also ensuring coverage for all users, workloads and devices regardless of where they are located, what they are built on, or what kind of network protocol is required.

Additional universal ZTNA resources

Blog: Universal ZTNA for Enterprise: Advance Innovation, Reduce Opex and Simplify Security
Analyst report: 2023 Nemertes Real Economic Value of Appgate SDP
Forrester webinar: Shift Toward Zero Trust Access Everywhere
Solution brief: Zero Trust Access for Corporate Networks