Monday, May 20

Elevating Network Security – How ZTNA Delivers Enhanced Protection

Modern organizations must have their data accessible anywhere, anytime, from a remote workforce using any device. Providing this access requires granular context-aware security policies to reduce data leakage and the risk of external threats. Integrating ZTNA into a secure access service edge (SASE) solution delivers holistic control and visibility, including monitoring post-connection user traffic and credentials. This eliminates reliance on point products and provides faster deployment and easier management.

Security Policy Management

Zero trust network access (ZTNA) is a secure remote access solution that delivers complete security functions, including security policy management. This enables businesses to ensure that only valid users and healthy devices can access their applications. This helps to mitigate BYOD and remote work challenges by ensuring that only those who need access can access critical business assets. This approach also improves data privacy and compliance by enforcing minor privilege policies. In addition, it can reduce the attack surface by enabling businesses to create software-defined perimeters that segment their internal network. This limits threat actors’ lateral movement and can prevent them from moving to other unprotected systems within the network in case of a breach. Lastly, zero trust application access hides infrastructure from public discovery and enables users to connect directly to the apps they need without connecting to the corporate network. This reduces the impact of a breach, decreases visibility on the public internet, and helps organizations comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA. However, it is essential to note that deploying zero-trust technology requires significant planning, integration, and coordination across multiple departments within a business. This can lead to increased implementation costs and project timelines. A zero-trust approach can also require significant bandwidth for encryption and other security strategies. These can negatively impact user experience and network performance. To minimize these impacts, it is recommended that businesses carefully evaluate the infrastructure requirements, bandwidth capacity, and performance implications of a zero-trust implementation before committing to it.

Authentication

ZTNA authenticates users on their managed or BYOD devices using identity-based verification and a unified view of applications. This eliminates the need for separate logins and passwords to secure apps across the internet or cloud environments. It also helps reduce insider threats and simplify BYOD programs. Using the Zero Trust network access principle of least privilege, ZTNA makes application access invisible to unauthorized users by delivering a secure connection to each specific application on a one-to-one basis. This eliminates overly permissive access, prevents lateral movement of malware, and dramatically reduces attack surfaces. It’s important to remember that zero trust does not mean no access. Instead, it means that no resource, user, or device is trusted by default and that all connections are evaluated in real-time based on contextual information such as the time of day, location, and more. The result is a security posture that constantly adapts to the threat landscape to provide an agile defense against the most advanced threats. Attackers often gain initial access to the corporate network through a compromised account and then move laterally to other systems and apps within the organization. ZTNA helps mitigate this by controlling access privileges based on user and device health checks and other contextual information. This can significantly limit lateral movement and protect your business against attacks that could otherwise cause significant damage.

Isolation

The traditional security perimeter needs to be improved with business applications across the cloud and on-premises, many of which are accessed by remote employees and distributed teams. Zero trust application access hides infrastructure from public discovery, bridging users to applications through secure tunnels only established upon identity and context verification. This limits the impact of any breach by preventing threat actors from moving laterally within your organization. With ZTNA, IT teams can implement granular policies restricting access to specific applications for users on managed and unmanaged devices. These policies are built based on user and device context, network location, time of day, and more to ensure access privileges match business requirements. This also allows IT to bypass relying on IP and port numbers for access control, which attackers easily manipulate to bypass traditional firewalls and gain entry to the network. ZTNA also offers advanced features like dynamic access policy updates and continuous security inspection to protect against threats that may have evolved in the time between connections. Zero trust access also enables micro-segmentation to limit visibility into other networks, thus further limiting the impact of a breach. Sophisticated attacks.

Zero Standing Privilege

A significant part of the attack surface of most organizations is privileged access. Local administrator accounts, shared accounts (including superuser and root), never-offboarded 3rd party privileges, and password-based system access contribute to the growth of standing privileges in a network. This gives attackers a significant opportunity to exploit stolen credentials and steal information. Zero standing privilege takes security a step further by removing permanent user access permissions and instead providing users with “just in time” credentials created in real-time, verified for every login, and paired with permissions built from the policy in real-time. This enables administrators to verify identity and context and then limit the amount of information that can be accessed. For example, a BYOD policy may require the user to be at work to access company data. This prevents users from connecting from an unsecured WiFi connection in a coffee shop or airport and helps mitigate data leakage and loss. ZTNA enables secure access to internal applications, cloud apps, and infrastructure using application-level identification rather than network constructs like IP and port numbers. This eliminates the need for a VPN and allows IT to define, monitor, and enforce access policies that prevent lateral movement within the organization and limit the impact of a breach.

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