The Evolution of ZTNA to Fully Support Zero Trust Strategy

Zero trust network access (ZTNA) proved to be an important technology initiativeduring the pandemic, allowing organizations to empower remote workers by offering solutions that provided improvements in security, manageability, and scalability as opposed to using their existing virtual private networks alone. The transition to remote and hybrid work has had an ongoing and profound impact—not only on where we work, but also on how work gets done. Now, work is no longer a place we go, but more of an activity we perform. As businesses have adjusted to this new model of hybrid work, with users and applications being anywhere and everywhere, the teams responsible for IT, networking, and security are facing new challenges in the form of a massively increased attack surface due to direct-tc-app connectivity. 

Organizations have deployed ZTNA sclutions as a way to try and get a handle on this trend by modernizing infrastructure to deliver needed networking and security capabilities in a cloud-delivered services edge—thus facilitating direct-to-app connectivity as close to the user and app as possible. However, first-generation/ZTNA 1.0 solutions fall short in many ways on delivering on the promise of true zero trust. In fact, they grant more access than is desired What's more, once access is granted in ZTNA 1.0 solutions, the connection is implidtly trusted forever, allowing a handy exploit route for sophisticated threats and/or malicious actions and behavior.