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Enable the new hybrid workforce with cloud-native zero trust by Lisa Lorenzin, Senior Director, Transformation Strategy, Zscaler The rapid expansion of remote work due to the pandemic has forever changed the face of enterprise cyber security, and the effects are still rippling across the business landscape. Even as users return to the office, we’ll still need to secure a sizable work-from-anywhere (WFA) population. This new hybrid workforce is here to stay: some people work remotely, some go into the office, and some toggle between the two as needs dictate. As a result, there is no better time than now to implement a zero trust strategy.
A rebalancing act The massive move to WFA during the pandemic eroded the foundations of network-centric, castle-and-moat legacy architecture through shifting patterns and sheer volumes of traffic. To compensate, many organizations invested heavily in virtual private network (VPN) technology. As users return to the office, those same VPNs are over-provisioned, depreciating in value, and don’t support ongoing network and security transformation. VPNs lack the necessary flexibility to follow users, devices, and applications to new virtual perimeters. The net is that security costs and complexity increased, but granular visibility didn’t. Forward-looking IT teams, in turn, are seizing the opportunity to overcome the challenges of VPNs by turning to new cloud-native secure access solutions to help drive innovation both within IT and for the business. Modern cloud-native security solutions extend zero trust principles to enable and secure WFA access to applications, without requiring public exposure or complex network segmentation. Security, simplicity, and user experience go hand-in-hand in this new model, which al8
lows for seamless access across all the permutations of the hybrid workforce.
Regaining your footing with zero trust Zero trust initially envisioned context-based controls for least-privilege access for on-premise users accessing internally hosted apps. But as the pandemic demonstrated, IT teams also require a solution that offers seamless access for remote workers. By extending these tenets to the new hybrid workforce, IT teams can provide secure access to any application or asset without publicly exposing the application, asset, or even the infrastructure that supports access. A zero trust architecture provides security, granularity, and visibility no matter where users, applications, or assets live. At Zscaler, our cloud-delivered zero trust solution, Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), allows IT teams to deliver a consistent, frictionless user experience for employees, third parties, and B2B communication. Access is seamless regardless of whether the user is “off-network” or “on-network”—the network doesn’t matter anymore. The policy environment is simplified, becoming user- and app-centric rather than network-centric, and consistent across cloud and data centre application environments. Granular policies for context-based access ensure least-privileged connections, combining user and device attributes to permit access only by authorized users on compliant devices. Since zero trust connects users to specific applications rather than allowing endpoints access to the entire network, yesterday’s “virtual private network” evolves into today’s secure access service edge (SASE). Public service edges provide transport to remote applications, while private service edges support local and SECON CYBER
