The rise of the work-from-home (WFH) economy, spurred on by the COVID pandemic but effecting a sea-change in how teams operate long after it subsided, has hit security teams hard and fast. Ensuring secure connectivity for thousands of remote workers has been a challenge the cybersecurity industry was ill-equipped to handle.
Lacking new and (really) innovative solutions designed to address this new reality, security teams defaulted to a combination of two approaches readily available in their toolkits - Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). Both of these approaches are, unfortunately, lacking, with each carrying legacy issues that leave remote connectivity slow, inefficient, and, yes, sometimes insecure.
As we look to the future of remote connectivity and security, we should examine the limitations of these existing technologies and define the ideal solution to replace them. Read the full article we published about it on Forbes here.
The article examines some of the pros and cons of VPN and ZTNA:
- VPNs provide direct connections to the organizational networks, and therefore the best connectivity performance and user experience. However, they are inherently insecure, since they require opening the VPN server port to the internet where anyone can try to hack it.
- ZTNA is less vulnerable than VPNs, since it doesn’t expose any of the ZTNA server ports to the internet. However, this technology results in substantially reduced networking performance, much higher costs associated with the required cloud networking leading to a much higher price point for the customer, and various new security risks and operational issues caused by the fact all outside connection are obfuscated and appear as if they are coming from a single IP address.
Only a new product, designed from the ground up to address this new paradigm, can truly address its needs without creating issues. An ideal solution should tick the following boxes by featuring:
- Reasonable pricing
- A set-it-and-forget-it technology
- The elimination of the VPN attack surface
- Employee and vendor access to a one-stop shop
- An optimized end-user experience with maximum performance
And this is exactly what we are building next, something with all the benefits of VPN and ZTNA combined without their downsides. Stay tuned for a major announcement coming soon :)
For more, check out the full article here.