“VPNs often end up creating new security problems”

Virtual private networks (VPN), which were originally developed to enable remote workers to connect into the corporate network back when only a fraction of the workforce was working, created new network security headaches when used at a previously unheard of scale with organizations switched to Remote Work overnight during this pandemic. Although VPNs are considered as a quick way for the remote users to get to internal applications, they are slow for users, offer poor security, and are difficult to manage and scale as well. In an interview with Soma Tah, Forcepoint Chief Product Officer Nico Popp elaborates on how zero trust network access (ZTNA) solutions rethink network security functions and are designed to solve the challenges posed by the legacy VPNs.

- Soma Tah

Nico popp Chief Product Officer, Forcepoint

Why should organizations with existing investments in VPN spend again on ZTNA? Does it offer any tangible benefits over traditional VPN?

VPNs often end up creating new security problems by making remote users part of the internal network. VPNs are also notorious for slowing down cloud apps access, especially for the highly interactive ones and most organizations today are using interactive business cloud applications such as the Google Workspace (formerly Gsuite), O365, and the like.

Users sometimes go to great lengths to avoid using VPNs, leaving themselves unprotected by internal gateways. Then, when they do connect to the VPN, often they are given the same full range of access on internal networks that they would have in the office. They can get to any application, any server, any database, and so on. But it also means that anybody who is pretending to be an authorized user, or who has compromised the user’s laptop or the public Wi-Fi network where they’re connecting from, also can get to anything. Limiting what remote users can access can be done with network security technologies such as firewalls. But setting up intricate rules for controlling which users can get to which parts of the network – called micro-segmentation – requires expertise and can lead to errors as resources move around.