If you use the cloud extensively or work in a big corporation, you have probably heard of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), but you might not know what is it and how it works. ZTNA is a defense strategy turned into software that will protect your data and privacy. There are several features and benefits to it, so how does ZTNA keep you secure? What does it actually do?

What Is Zero Trust Network Access?

To understand the concept of ZTNA, you must initially understand the Zero Trust security model. This is the mentality that no one should be "trusted" from inside or outside the network (i.e. person, system, or device) to gain access to your network. This means placing resources that must verify security, guaranteeing the safety of your applicants by validating all access privileges.

Its name refers to the strength or capacity that you must have at a critical point at the infrastructure level; which is network access, verifying who, what, when, where, why, and how they connect to network resources, restricting access and minimizing the risk of data loss. Essentially, ZTNA is a product that creates identity-based access boundaries across an app (such as the cloud) or series of apps.

A ZTNA security approach has become critical due to the growing popularity of cloud work migration, direct internet access, and work-from-anywhere trends. Every day, there are more and more cloud base tools and apps to make working from home easier. Naturally, this increases the need for protection from cybercriminals.

What Does ZTNA Allow?

There are four critical components of ZTNA security you should be aware of:

• ZTNA security programs will isolate network and application access, meaning a user can access the network but not access all applications. This isolation reduces risks to the network, such as infection from compromised devices, and only grants access to authorized users.
• These programs ensure that users and networks can only make outgoing connections, ensuring that both the network and application infrastructure are invisible to unauthorized users. IPs are never exposed, which makes the network untraceable.
• ZTNA security only allows authorized users access to applications, which are only granted on an individual basis. These authorized users will have access solely to specific apps and will be constantly monitored in order to protect the network from hacked accounts. It's similar in that sense to an Identity Access Management (IAM) system, which supports identity management in the cloud.
• ZTNA programs facilitate access to multi-cloud and hybrid applications or resources by performing centralized control of access policies.

For a ZTNA to work correctly, you need to identify sensitive data and define their uses; this will help you manually perform micro-segmentation, content inspection, application protection, timely identification of users, device security postures, micro-segmented access that each user has to the different software, and simple connectivity for the user.

Benefits of a ZTNA

There are numerous advantages to a ZTNA.

You will no longer need to rely on a VPN, captive portals, DDoS prevention, global load balancing, and firewall packets because these are all taken care of under the ZTNA security strategy.

Because a ZTNA consists of one product, you will have consistent security policies, which will not have a seamless experience for all users and devices. Security policies can be tailored and centrally controlled to simplify regulatory compliance.

ZTNA also means it's quick and easy to implement instant scaling up/down security capabilities through cloud-delivered agents with the ability to adjust cloud workloads. This overlaps with a Cloud Workload Protection Platform.

With controlled connections and inputs, a ZTNA will further allow you better connectivity, including to the internet, intranet, wired and wireless connections, and cellular. Better connectivity will permit seamless end-to-end encrypted tunnels for all client-to-application connections.

Finally, a ZTNA will reduce attacks by allowing only set users access. This prevents cybercriminals installing malware, and will even stop some users (prohibited from conducting lateral movement) from discovering assets inside the network, meaning that all assets will be invisible to non-authorized users. This in turn will decrease the chance of making an asset a target of an attack.

So Will a ZTNA Help You?

In a nutshell, a ZTNA trusts nothing and considers no segment of the network to be inherently secure. This will definitely bump up your security. ZTNA's default security strategy is "reject all, block all, never connect", an approach that will hide the visibility of all your assets and dramatically reduce attacks on your system. This is useful for individuals, but it's mostly employed by networks and organizations with a lot of users and lots of connections.