5 Key Features to Look for in Your ZTNA Solution 

Choosing the right ZTNA solution for your organization is critical to securing your digital transformation and cloud initiatives. Look for a comprehensive universal solution that safeguards access across your users, use cases, workloads and corporate network.

Zero trust security is a principle that requires limiting access to resources on a need-to-know basis. That means no user or network is assumed to be trustworthy without continuous identity verification and the least privilege concept.

Scalability

When considering ZTNA solutions, looking for a solution that can quickly scale is essential. This will ensure your organization can keep pace with the growing number of users and devices that use ZTNA.

Scaling is especially essential for organizations that rely on remote workers to access business applications and services. These employees are often located across multiple locations and use various devices, making it difficult for traditional firewalls and VPNs to keep up.

Fortunately, ZTNA can help to minimize third-party risk by providing granular controls over who can access what applications within an organization’s network. Additionally, centralized management of a ZTNA solution allows you to monitor all users and application activity in real-time.

A good ZTNA solution should be part of a SASE architecture that minimizes deployment complexity, reduces opex and capex, and helps organizations securely embrace cloud computing, digital transformation, and remote work. It should also be designed to support cloud, legacy, and containerized workloads, with the ability to utilize existing orchestration and security tools.

Flexibility

Supporting multiple cloud providers and remote endpoints is critical to modern business. For example, a business needs to be able to provide secure access to their most sensitive data from anywhere in the world, on any device, at any time, while maintaining a high productivity level and minimizing the risk of security breaches.

The right ZTNA solution can help meet these challenges while delivering many other benefits for your organization. The best ones can offer a unified interface that seamlessly integrates identity and access management (IAM), network services, and network security into a seamless security stack.

A well-designed and implemented ZTNA solution can positively impact the bottom line with fewer lost productivity hours, lowered operations costs, and more secure data. But how do you know the best solution for your unique needs? Fortunately, several factors should be considered before you make your final decision. The best way to ensure you get the most out of your ZTNA solutions is to ask the right questions and partner with a trusted advisor who can guide your next big step toward a secure and connected mobile enterprise.

Security

A good ZTNA solution should offer advanced security features such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP). It must also be dependable to minimize unnecessary downtime.

Zero trust network access enables organizations to reduce insider risk by verifying users and devices before granting them access to sensitive resources. It can also help prevent supply chain attacks by giving contractors, and vendors access to specific internal applications — and only that.

In addition, it imposes the principle of least privilege to improve data security and compliance standards. It also allows for granular visibility and reporting to enable security audits and demonstrate a commitment to regulatory requirements.

Security should be critical to your overall Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. Your ZTNA solution must integrate natively with your SASE’s Secure Web Gateways (SWGs), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs) and other security and networking capabilities.

Integration

If your business is pursuing a zero-trust approach to security, your ZTNA solution must integrate with your existing network infrastructure. This includes your firewalls, NGFW and secure software-defined WAN (SDS WAN) gateways.

With these integrations, users can only access the resources they’re authorized to use and only in the ways you allow them. This can reduce the risks of lateral movement by malicious users and ensure your data is protected.

Another crucial part of an exemplary ZTNA implementation is the ability to manage access controls across your environment. This includes reflecting user risk score in real-time, applying an adaptive access policy, and rescinding access if a user leaves the organization.

One of the most common and widely used use cases for ZTNA is to secure hybrid and multi-cloud access. This is because organizations need to connect to various applications, including those hosted in cloud environments. These are typically micro-services based and may not reside on the same network as those in the organization.

Performance

Zero trust network access (ZTNA) is an emerging security model restricting access to applications and services via a trusted broker. Unlike virtual private networks (VPNs), ZTNA allows for granular and dynamic policies to protect corporate assets and hybrid workforces better.

As part of a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, ZTNA is critical to help organizations protect against breaches of privileged credentials, endpoints and devices. In addition, as apps move between on-premises servers, private clouds and the public cloud, ZTNA provides the visibility needed to ensure that only trusted devices and users can access those applications.

A high-performing ZTNA solution must handle the large traffic volumes in a modern, multi-cloud environment while preserving user experience and speeding up connectivity. For this reason, it must support a variety of deployment models, including agentless options for BYOD and agent-based alternatives for managed devices. It should also offer threat prevention using behavior-based detection and advanced DLP capabilities to prevent malware from affecting other devices or employees through downloads.