How zero trust access protects your data

The pandemic created a tectonic shift in the way most organizations operate, with many employees forced to work from home.

This revealed many benefits for both parties that have turned remote working and hybrid workplaces into a productive and sustainable way of operating.

This new normal, with a multitude of branch offices of one person, has also created some additional challenges and exposed many issues with remote access VPN.

The time is right for ZTNA

Fortunately, zero trust network access – or ZTNA – has emerged as the perfect solution, at the perfect time.

ZTNA enables remote workers to seamlessly and transparently access the applications, data, and systems they need to be productive, while simultaneously solving all the major issues with VPN: scalability, management, performance, and most importantly, security.

Security first

Data security and privacy are critically important and justifiably regulated across most jurisdictions: GDPR in Europe, the Data Protection Act in the UK, CCPA in the USA, PIPEDA in Canada, and the Privacy Act in Australia, to name just a few.

Some jurisdictions, like Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the United States Federal Government, have taken data protection a step further by mandating state-of-the-art cybersecurity standards using technologies like zero trust.

ZTNA versus VPN

Naturally, no organization can afford a data breach, but many are at a loss as to how best to protect against them. Where remote workers are involved, ZTNA is an essential first step as it offers many benefits over VPN:

• Unlike VPN, ZTNA doesn’t offer implicit trust and broad access to internal networks. In fact, it works the opposite way, where users are ONLY allowed access to very specific resources while everything else is blocked. The remote device is not “on the network,” which means lateral movement is effectively gone.
• ZTNA can work clientless or integrated with an endpoint protection agent to offer better end-user security and eliminate any potential vulnerabilities in old VPN client software.
• ZTNA makes your hosted networked applications completely invisible to the outside world, dramatically reducing your surface area of attack.
• ZTNA eliminates credential theft as a potential point of entry as multi-factor authentication is an integral part of the solution.

And the best part is, ZTNA is much easier to scale and manage than remote-access VPN solutions. Check out what the BSI Group says about ZTNA in their brief.

Learn more

To learn more about ZTNA, watch this short video:

Also, be sure to download our latest white paper: The Top Six Advantages of ZTNA to get started or visit Sophos.com/ZTNA to learn more.

Sophos ZTNA as a service

If you haven’t already, join our early access program for Sophos ZTNA as a service that makes ZTNA deployment easier than ever.