Reducing risk and encouraging innovation
Legacy access strategies for VPNs and firewalls add a layer of risk, as they typically establish connections before authenticating them. These bandwidth-hungry approaches can also affect user experience, increase cyber-risk, and add complexity to remote working and cloud migration.
With no two companies having the same cyber-measures in place, the invisible threat surface also grows in tandem with the supply chain.
These issues combine to add risk and inhibit innovation. But there is a solution.
What is ZTNA?
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) ensures secure access for remote users by creating a set of conditionals for user access. It employs the Zero Trust model which operates based on distrust over trust, claiming there are ‘no assumptions, only verification’. At each point of the network, there are strict checks in place to authenticate user access. This is based on various attributes and context such as date and time, to determine whether users should be granted access.
What does ZTNA do?
A ZTNA solution allows access to networks through a secure and encrypted tunnel. It operates through a ‘dark cloud’, inhibiting users from seeing any aspects of the network which are not relevant to them. This means that in the case of a malicious attack, only specific regions of the network will be compromised because access to the whole network is not granted. This removes data and other assets from view for all and significantly reduces the extent to which an attacker can access and cause damage to an organisation’s system.
Why do you need ZTNA?
A ZTNA solution is very beneficial in the current technology landscape as organisations continue to move away from legacy systems, such as VPN. ZTNA is more flexible and precise in its functions. It can be customised to specific network demands, whereas VPN adopts a one-stop system. As a result, VPN allows broad access to users, which in the case of an attack, grants hackers visibility across the whole network.
By adopting a granular access system with an advanced user authentication, the impact of potential attacks is greatly reduced. Due to the unified structure of a ZTNA network, all data is managed together, once again increasing visibility for security teams.
More control is granted to security teams who can continually monitor user and device behaviour. This grants them further visibility into the network. Employing ZTNA maintains a certain level of compliance for your company, which is necessary to remain eligible for Cyber Insurance policies.
Additionally, by providing remote access to the cloud and network applications, ZTNA is a relevant solution to the modern hybrid working environment. Fast internet and secure access to online data are functions of ZTNA which are increasingly beneficial to home workers. Once implemented, the solution is extremely easy to integrate with current infrastructures and can be scaled according to organisational needs.
Contact us today to discuss your needs
Our Service
This service applies an architectural approach where inherent trust in the network is removed, the network is assumed hostile, and each request is verified based on a pre-defined access policy. Zero trust provides a robust and contextual access strategy for your workforce and supply chain by knowing the user, service, or device, and applying strict policies to authenticate and authorise requests, granting access for the required duration and rendering everything else invisible.
However, with many businesses not having the required resources or skills to run a zero trust platform, our Managed Zero Trust Access Service provides flexible options to help take the pain of maintaining a secure access strategy away, so your employees can focus on more meaningful and profitable tasks.
Support
We combine the best zero trust security technology with people-centric persistence to deliver key business outcomes, through two flexible service options:
Our supported service is ideal for organisations that want to manage their own ZTNA solution, but with the confidence that they have a team of experts available to help with setup and ongoing support.
Working with you, we will:
- Help you define your access policy.
- Identify resources you want to protect.
- Determine access requirements for user groups.
- Establish authentication and authorisation rules.
- Help you with deployment.
- Identify where to deploy ZTNA.
- Determine the number of site deployments required to cover your network.
- Resiliency options.
- Help you with configuration.
- Setup accounts.
- Management server.
- Client software.
- Authentication.
- Access policies and rules.
- General guidance
- Help to familiarise yourself with the ZTNA solution.
- Advise on best practices.
- Ongoing support
Everything you get with Supported as a Managed Service, plus:
- Keep the ZTNA solution up to date with the latest patches and security updates.
- Provide configuration backups.
- Run regular system checks to ensure system integrity and availability.
- Ongoing configuration changes
- Periodic reviews and updates to access policies based on evolving security requirements.
- Access to a Dashboard and useful information.
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