The Requirements of a Secure Access Solution – Balance Security and Productivity

With a Secure Access solution in place, organisations can enforce policy compliance by employees, guests and contractors regardless of location, device type, or device ownership. Users enjoy greater productivity and the freedom to work anywhere without sacrificing access to authorised network resources and applications. IT can mitigate malware, data loss and IoT risks. And IT is empowered to optimise their resources and enable digital transformation across the organisation.

Integrated mobile security

First, a Zero Trust Secure Access solution must enable enterprise mobility to boost workforce productivity. This requires enabling visibility and compliance controls in a transparent way across different devices and operating systems. It involves simplifying the secure use of mobile devices by offering automated, self- service on-boarding of devices – whether they are laptops, smartphones, or tablets – regardless of user location and device ownership. Mobility enablement also requires the ability to ensure compliance by isolating work applications and data from private applications in BYOD scenarios. Lastly, a Secure Access solution must support always.

Simple and easy-to-use UX

A Zero Trust Secure Access solution must also take into consideration users’ consumer-based expectations for a simple, integrated user experience (UX). For example, end users want the convenience of Single Sign On (SSO) to applications across devices, operating systems and application infrastructures. IT administrators demand an intuitive and flexible way to orchestrate all elements of access security – freeing them from the need to correlate data and actions across multiple security systems and consoles. Additionally, a best-in-class solution will optimise the user experience by leveraging an integrated Application Delivery Control (ADC) solution, guaranteeing timely response to meet any demand, regardless of whether users access applications on site or remotely.

End-to-end hybrid IT security and visibility

The increase in cyberattacks coupled with the move to hybrid IT environments means that a Zero Trust Secure Access solution must offer end-to-end hybrid IT security and visibility. The solution should provide user, device and access operational intelligence to allow for informed policy development, threat response and reporting. Such a solution should combine multi-factor authentication with role-based and device-compliant authorised access to applications, whether the applications are hosted in enterprise data centres, private clouds, or public clouds. An integrated platform, incorporating both perimeter-based (VPN) and Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) architectures provides versatility to address a broad number of business needs while offering deployment flexibility and management economies.

Unified and scalable platform

The difficulties associated with multiple security silos can be mitigated by adopting a unified Zero Trust Secure Access platform. A unified platform provides appropriate application access that supports physical and virtual IT resources across on-premise and cloud environments. It must also provide endpoint coverage across classic PCs, mobile and even IoT devices, requiring the application of agent and agentless Client technology. Given the growth in users and devices, a unified platform must be sufficiently scalable to handle the steady

Unified policy engine for users, devices, and applications

Policy unification is another way to combat the gaps that can be created by multiple security silos. Unlike siloed solutions, policy unification enables rules to be written once and automatically applied enterprise-wide. SDP architectures offer a unified and centralized policy engine that is context-aware, enabling enforcement of granular policies based on user, role, device, location, time, network and application, as well as endpoint security state. To minimize IT administrative workloads and ensure interoperability with third-party solutions, policy enforcement should be standards-based.

Seamless integration across multiple vendor solutions

Establishing a unified platform and policy engine is made easier and effective by partnering with a single vendor who can orchestrate Zero Trust Secure Access controls across multiple vendor solutions. To minimise IT administrative workloads, bi-directional interoperability should be standards-based and support a variety of third-party solutions. Applying this approach allows a single vendor to incorporate new technologies as they become available and enable greater enterprise availability, resiliency, elasticity and scalability.

Extensibility to new endpoints, services, and applications

Finally, as demonstrated by the growing need for IoT and multi-cloud security, a Zero Trust Secure Access solution must be intelligent and adaptable. The solution must be able to discover, segment and monitor sanctioned and unsanctioned IoT devices on the network and private cloud employing advanced device profiling, classification, analytics and threat response. Furthermore, as IOT devices interface with corporate application including IT and OT (Operational Technology) convergence, Secure Access functionality must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate future use cases without compromising availability, performance, compliance, or security.

Original source: Zero Trust Secure Access Checklist via https://www.pulsesecure.net

Read Secure Access for Today and Tomorrow: Part 1 here

Read Secure Access for Today and Tomorrow: Part 2 here