So many businesses have shifted to hybrid work environments the past couple of years. That has meant more employees working remotely and more personal devices on home Wi-Fi accessing corporate networks and resources. Network teams typically have no control over the local home office network – and certainly not over public Wi-Fi. To keep access to the applications and data secure, companies needed to implement more innovative solutions and strategies.
With that said, more than two-thirds of companies believe that zero trust network access is an ideal solution for addressing work-from-anywhere risk, according to 2022 ZTNA report by EMA, commissioned by GoodAccess.
Zero trust authorizes access to digital resources based on multifactor policies that combine user identity with other contextual factors, such as device state and user location. Zero trust will continually monitor user access to ensure that authorized users remain compliant with policies, and it challenges users to re-authenticate themselves based on observed behavior. Compare this to legacy VPN services that establish a connection after a user authenticates with simple credentials, and it is evident why companies are shifting to zero trust.
"The nature of work has permanently changed over the last few years,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research, EMA. “When businesses need to protect remote access to important business assets, cloud-delivered zero trust networking and security solutions are some of the main enablers of modern data security nowadays."
Smaller companies say there are barriers when adopting zero trust, such as budget, and complexity – they say zero trust is too complex to implement and they lack personnel with zero trust skills. To counter those perceptions, cloud-delivered zero trust solutions require limited capital outlay and are priced for modest budgets. They also mitigate complexity because they require no on-premises hardware or software aside from client agents and they offload much of the engineering and administrative requirements to the provider.
"Complexity has always been the enemy of security and the thing that keeps it from being implemented in the first place or used as directed in the second place," said Michal Cízek, CEO and co-founder, GoodAccess.
Companies with limited resources are encouraged to look for a managed or SaaS-based zero trust solution.
GoodAccess is a cloud-based SaaS application that enables organizations to create a resilient, zero trust network with identity-, policy- and device-assessment-based access control as well as safe connections to a company's cloud-based applications and resources.
Cloud-delivered solutions mitigate complexity and enable easy adoption by any type or size of company or organization. By eliminating the need for hardware and cumbersome software suites to simplify set-up and ongoing maintenance, cloud-delivered zero trust will address many of the adoption barriers that smaller companies perceive with zero trust technologies in general.
Edited by
Erik Linask
