VPNs are no longer adequate to secure remote work. What alternative should businesses adopt?
Zero Trust isn’t a standalone tool or framework. Instead, it encompasses a series of guidelines to fortified security in a business environment. The first step in embracing Zero Trust is to minimize the network’s potential breach points. This aim is to safeguard your crucial digital entities, such as customer and employee information, vital applications pivotal to your business operations, and the infrastructure that facilitates employees’ routine tasks.
Even after the pandemic, remote work is set to continue its upward trend. Initially, companies depended on virtual private networks (VPN) to secure internal network resources. However, VPNs have lost their effectiveness in securing remote work. For example, once remote employees log in via VPN, they obtain unrestricted access to business resources. This unverified and liberal access can be manipulated by a hacker to obtain sensitive information. Consequently, VPN solutions contradict the Zero Trust principle. The Zero Trust approach proposes that users should only have access to data and resources pertinent to their work tasks, without any surplus. HPE Aruba Networking’s ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) is designed to achieve this.
HPE Aruba Networking’s ZTNA safeguards access to all necessary applications and business tools for employees, regardless of their location. HPE ZTNA replaces the VPN devices with a more manageable software, known as a connector. This connector facilitates access to your confidential applications, irrespective of where they are stored, whether on-site or on the public cloud. The connector limits potential breaches by making your business applications only available to HPE Aruba Networking’s SSE (Security Service Edge), and not the entire Internet. Additionally, the connector only necessitates outbound connections to HPE Aruba Networking SSE, eliminating the need for IT administrators to inaugurate inbound firewall ports for the connector.
So, how does our ZTNA solution work? When a remote employee requests access to an application via an agent or user portal (agentless), HPE Aruba Networking SSE mediates and terminates that initial user request. In our solution, there are no passthrough connections allowed to your private applications. HPE Aruba Networking SSE will also validate the user’s identity and based on the policy, connect them securely to applications without granting access to the corporate network. At a granular level, users only have access to the applications needed to do their work, which is key to successfully implementing Zero Trust.
HPE Aruba Networking consolidates many SSE (Security Service Edge) capabilities, such as Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) into a single admin console. Our ZTNA solution is a modern platform, easy to configure and manage, that provides far better protection than legacy VPN solutions.
To learn more about the risk of using VPN and how you can accelerate your Zero Trust journey with HPE Aruba Networking, please check out my lightboard video.
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