By Censornet
Zero Trust is a paradigm that is becoming a guiding philosophy for the cybersecurity industry. But the technology that will turn the thinking into a reality is Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
By 2023, 60% of enterprises will have phased out VPNs (virtual private networks) and replaced them with ZTNA, Gartner has predicted.
Even if an organisation has not yet considered moving to a Zero Trust model and implementing ZTNA, it should be laying the groundwork to ensure the changes happen as smoothly as possible. Censornet can help you on this journey, which we’ll start by explaining a little more about Zero Trust and ZTNA.
Goodbye VPN, hello ZTNA
Zero Trust and ZTNA turn the familiar mantra of ‘connect then authenticate’ on its head. Instead, Zero Trust demands a security approach where users must ‘authenticate, then connect’ and reminds security teams to ‘never trust, always verify’. In short, context – including identity – is everything.
ZTNA isolates systems from potential trespassers and hides applications from the internet. This makes applications more resilient to many forms of network-based attack including scans, vulnerability exploits, DoS and DDoS attacks.
Before letting anyone into a network, they should first be identified. Risk should be assessed at that point, based on context, but also continually throughout the session. It is no longer enough for a user to simply fire up a VPN and connect. Identity, along with other contexts such as time and day must be considered, as well as other data points such as device, location, and even geo-velocity.
First steps to Zero Trust
For many organisations adopting a Zero Trust model, using ZTNA, is the first stage on the road to the next great paradigm: Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). Censornet’s guide will help you understand Zero Trust, discover how it can benefit your organisation, and assist you with taking those crucial first steps towards the future of your own cloud security.
