The Fast Mode spoke to Ari Weil, VP of GTM Strategy at Cyera on the impact of traffic visibility on ZTNA networks. Ari joins us in a series of discussions with leading cybersecurity and networking vendors, assessing the evolution of ZTNA technologies, the roadmap for ZTNA deployments, the benefits of ZTNA for enterprise and telco networks, and the need for real-time traffic visibility technologies such as DPI for ZTNA.
Ariana: Why is cloud a key component of ZTNA?
Ari: ZTNA is part of an overall Zero Trust architecture, which is at its core a cloud security model. ZTNA solves foundational scalability and applicability challenges that VPN access represents in providing secure remote access to an organization's applications, data, and services. In the modern era, businesses are taking advantage of an increasing number of cloud services as a core part of their enterprise architecture. VPNs cannot scale to meet the demands of this growth in adoption, just as it is challenged in keeping pace with the rate of change that applications, data, services, and the people who need to interact with them represent.
Ariana: What challenges do you see across ZTNA deployments?
Ari: ZTNA was designed to provide secure remote access to applications, data, and services. However a key gap in ZTNA solutions is the ability to identify the data that is being created, transited, and accessed by applications and services. Today's solutions rely on tagging/metadata and, at best, deep packet inspection to understand data. However tagging/metadata are frequently missing or inaccurate, since they are either created by manual attestation or rudimentary pattern-matching processes, that are typically a point-in-time exercise. Given the rate of creation and change in data for the modern enterprise, this leaves them exposed to misuse and accidental disclosures, insider threats, account compromise, and ransomware - all of which can occur in a zero trust architecture that is not data-aware.
This interview is a part of The Fast Mode's Next-Gen DPI Traffic Visibility for ZTNA segment, featuring over 40 leading cybersecurity and networking solution providers and their views on the importance of traffic visibility for ZTNA. A research report on this topic will be published in January 2024 - for more information, visit here.
