Everything you need to know
VPN vs ZTNA:
The Ultimate Guide
Perimeter-Based Security
A VPN, or a virtual private network, is a secure and private connection that allows you to send data across a public network (like the internet) as if it were a private network.
Traditionally, companies housed all their information technology resources - applications, servers, data repositories, etc - “on premises,” in locations they controlled and managed directly. All of these were wired up to a company-controlled local or wide area network over which they communicated.
Because everything and everyone tended to be located on the same corporate network, the best security practice was securing the perimeter of this network.
When an employee needs access to that secured network, VPNs facilitate the creation of a secure encrypted connection to a network over the internet, which is considered an unsecured network.
Because VPNs essentially create a single walled perimeter, larger organizations will often segregate corporate resources by using multiple networks that still need to communicate. This requires building a complicated network of VPN connections between them and letting users connect to multiple VPN servers.
VPNs played a crucial role in securing the corporate network by extending the perimeter to remote users, but there are several limitations.
The growth of cloud-based SaaS products and IaaS providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform has led to many corporate resources existing outside the corporate network.
Perimeter-based defense solutions like VPNs are quickly becoming obsolete given that they no longer protect all the things that need protection
VPN Outcomes Explained
Granular Visibility and Control
With VPNs, users have access to all the resources on a network, whether they are relevant to the user or not. Therefore the whole network is exposed when an attacker breaches a VPN.
Incomplete Network Visibility
Admins can only see if and when a user has access the corporate network via VPN, making troubleshooting and risk mitigation challenging.
Exposure to the Public Internet
VPNs require open inbound ports, themselves a security risk, so malicious actors can identify which resources a company deems worth protecting.
Administrative Inefficiency
Resource-strapped teams are forced to field countless user complaints and dedicate valuable time and energy to deploying and maintaining legacy VPNs.
Reduced Productivity
VPNs come with significant latency and performance issues, slowing down and sometimes altogether stopping work for end users.
Hidden costs
In addition to the opportunity cost of dedicating resources to heavy deployment, maintenance, and troubleshooting, organizations using VPNs often need to invest in additional infrastructure to load balance traffic across their network.
Future Proof Security
What is Zero Trust Network Access?
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) addresses your visibility and risk management challenges head-on by abandoning the outdated trust assumptions of legacy solutions. ZTNA operates on the principle that trust must never be implicit and that verification is required from anyone and anything trying to access resources in your network. This approach fundamentally changes how you manage visibility and risk.
Granular Visibility and Control
ZTNA provides you with detailed insights into who is accessing what resources, from where, and under what conditions. This granular level of visibility ensures that any unauthorized or suspicious activities can be detected and mitigated promptly.
Seamless Management Across Environments
ZTNA solutions are designed to function across your diverse and complex IT ecosystems, offering visibility and control whether resources are hosted on-premises or in the cloud.
Proactive Risk Management
By continuously monitoring network activities, paired with least privilege access, ZTNA enables you to proactively identify and prevent security risks before they escalate into breaches.
Zero Trust Architecture Explained
ZTNA applies zero trust principles to remote access. As a core concept, zero trust assumes every component or connection is hostile by default, departing from earlier models based on secure network perimeters.
The underlying architecture
ZTNA solutions leverage distributed network architectures to allow for greater control of who can access what, without the performance sacrifice seen with traditional VPNs.
No implicit trust
This considers all traffic as potentially hostile, even that within the network perimeter. Access is blocked until validated by specific attributes such as a fingerprint or identity.
Context-aware policies
This stronger security approach remains with the workload regardless of where it communicates—be it a public cloud, hybrid environment, container, or an on-premises network architecture.
Multifactor authentication
Integrate multiple factors like user credentials, unique identity characteristics, familiar devices, and safe geographic locations to provide a comprehensive security layer.
Security for all environments
Protection applies regardless of communication environment, promoting secure cross-network communications without need for architectural changes or policy updates.
Surface area reduction
The number of unnecessary resource access edges granted to users is directly correlated to the size of the attack surface and the opportunity for lateral movements.
See how organizations leverage ZTNA
The Path to Zero Trust
When moving off of a perimiter-based solution like VPN to ZTNA, your security and IT teams should first focus on answering two questions:
What are you trying to protect?
From whom are you trying to protect it?
This strategy will inform the way you design your architecture. Following that, the most effective approach is to layer technologies and processes on top of your strategy, not the other way around.
In its ZTNA framework, Gartner recommends leveraging zero trust delivered as a service. You can also take a phased approach, starting with either your most critical assets or a test case of non-critical assets, before implementing zero trust more broadly. Whatever your starting point, an optimal zero trust solution will offer you immediate returns in risk reduction and security control.
Putting Zero Trust into Practice
Everyone wants to know what product to buy to implement Zero Trust best suited to each organization. The truth is that you won't know the answer to that until you've gone through the process.
1
Define the Protect Surface
Every Zero Trust environment is tailor-made for each protect surface. Until you know what you need to protect and how it works, you wont know the most effective solution. So first Identify what critical data, assets, applications, and services you need to protect.
2
Map the Transaction Flows
Understand how data moves within your organization to design appropriate access policies. There is never a time that any resource on your internal network should go outbound to an unknown server on the internet.
3
Architect Your Zero Trust Network
Reduce your exposure risk with direct peer-to-peer remote access that eliminates open inbound ports, prevents lateral network traffic, and makes it easy to apply fine-grained access policies based on user, location, and device.
See how easy Zero Trust can be by trying our free Starter plan for individuals. Or contact us to learn how Twingate ZTNA solutions can work for your team.
4
Create a Zero Trust Policy
Think about the who, what, where, when and why. Define policies based on user roles, data classification, and context. Only ensure that users have the least privilege access necessary to complete their tasks.
5
Monitor and Maintain
Continuously monitor network activity and adjust policies as needed to address emerging threats and changing business needs. Every security stack should be future proof and a system should be in place to for Continuous Threat Management (CTEM).
reduction in support tickets
Clear out admin inboxes and increase IT team efficiency by improving performance and reliability.
faster connection speeds
Improve productivity for end users by getting them connected to the resources they need to get work done.
reduction in deployment time
Improve your organization’s security posture faster and with fewer resources required.
