Beyond VPN: Building trust into network access

As cyberthreats grow more complex, enterprises are shifting from VPNs to ZTNA to achieve secure, scalable, and context-aware access for remote users.

- BY NAHIM FAZAL

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, securing an organisation's network has become more critical than ever.

While traditional methods such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) have been the go-to solutions for remote access to corporate resources, security architects have been facing scalability challenges with these solutions.

With cyberthreats becoming increasingly sophisticated and the demand for seamless, secure connectivity growing, it is time to consider a more robust alternative: Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). Implementing ZTNA over traditional VPNs offers significant security, usability, and operational advantages, especially in today's cloud-centric, remote work environments.

By replacing traditional VPNs with ZTNA, security leaders can enhance their organisation's security, improve the user experience, and support the dynamic needs of an enterprise workforce.

However, there is a popular misconception among organisations that implementing ZTNA means they are deploying zero trust and do not need to take any further action. ZTNA is not zero trust; it is one component of a zero-trust architecture. According to Gartner, ZTNA refers to products and services that create an identity- and context-based logical access boundary that encompasses an enterprise user and an internally hosted application or set of applications.

ZTNA creates a logical access boundary around the applications, hiding them from discovery and restricting access to a set of named entities. The policy enforcement point verifies the identity, context, and policy adherence of the specified participants before granting access, thereby minimising lateral movement across the network.

IMPROVED SCALABILITY, DISTRIBUTED CONTROL