Zero Trust: The End of the Beginning

Zero Trust as a concept and a security philosophy has certainly exploded in volume and breadth within the infosec community, as well as in the adjacent cloud, and networking sectors. Subjectively, vendor emphasis and enterprise interest in Zero Trust is higher than ever. Objectively, data sources such as Google Trends’ history for the past three years shows significant and meaningful growth.

As a vendor in this space, Appgate has been evangelizing and educating our prospects and customers about the need to embrace Zero Trust for years – and it is our recommendation that employing a Software-Defined Perimeter as the foundation for achieving that vision.

What we are seeing now is that not only is the need real, but that security leaders are pushing their organizations toward a more secure and more agile future, based on Zero Trust. The momentum is not merely anecdotal – over the past 12 months, we have seen:

• The inaugural Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Wave from Forrester
• The first Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access published by Gartner
• The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published their draft Zero Trust Architecture document, soliciting feedback from the public during Q4 2019

Appgate has worked very hard to build an enterprise-ready platform to meet a broad variety of Zero Trust use cases – including cloud migration, digital business transformation, third-party access, and privileged user access, and continue to improve it. In the past six months alone we have made some significant strides with Appgate SDP:

• Common Criteria certification
  In August, Appgate SDP received Common Criteria certification, the first SDP solution to achieve this milestone. Common Criteria is an international standard used by 30 countries to recognize solutions which provide validated information technology security solutions. While a government-based security certification, large enterprises recognize its stringent testing process for solution guidance and evaluation.

• Now live in Google Cloud Marketplace (GCP)
  Increasing demand has driven us to deploy Appgate SDP into the GCP marketplace, as well as enhance its auto-resolving features to support dynamic resolution of GCP metadata for large and complex projects

• Appgate SDP 5.0
  We have also introduced new product capabilities that ensure accessibility, extend Zero Trust protection to unmanaged devices, and provide peerless performance and scalability to meet large enterprise requirements. Specifically, our latest release of Appgate SDP — version 5.0 — includes new capabilities in three areas:
  

1. Expanding user populations who can be included in Zero Trust
2. Expanding the types of workloads which can be protected by Zero Trust
3. Expanding support for extremely large deployments

As the Zero Trust momentum continues to grow, we are excited to bring these new capabilities to the market. We are very confident that we are properly aligned with goals of Zero Trust, and that the continued differentiation of our platform brings market-leading access security, performance, and agility to the myriad use cases that enterprises encounter. We are pleased to see our customers’ success with Zero Trust, as evidenced by our very positive reviews in the Gartner Peer Insights system.

The trends toward adoption and usage of Zero Trust will only increase, and enterprises and security teams’ Zero Trust projects will grow in maturity and sophistication, solidifying the ground that moves beneath us. We encourage this, and likewise encourage practitioners to ask informed questions of their potential vendors about performance, scalability, availability, and operational complexity. The right Zero Trust solution can improve all of these.

The future of security is bright and Zero Trust is delivering a sea change to how we truly secure the modern enterprise. We are grateful to have been part of the beginning, and now we are optimistic about the future that Zero Trust will bring to the security community. We look forward to continuing this journey together.

To get a hands on experience with Appgate SDP, check out our 20 minute Test Drive.