The COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant mass movement to remote work significantly accelerated the development toward a more distributed and fragmented network infrastructure. This paradigm reinforced the need to implement stricter security controls around user and device access.

As organizations’ networks become more decentralized, there is a strong push and pull between delivering peak performance and ensuring cybersecurity. The solution to this conundrum, according to some security researchers, is to implement a Zero Trust Access (ZTA) along with Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). ZTA is premised on the notion that organizations should not trust anything inside or outside its network perimeter and thus it requires a more proactive approach to cybersecurity with organizations’ actively monitoring who has access to their network. ZTNA augments ZTA by “extending secure access controls to critical applications for any user or device, per use, whether they are on or off the network… [ZTNA] then automatically creates a secure connection and logs and monitors the transaction,” according to John Maddison, Chief Marketing Officer at Fortinet. As networks continue to evolve, employing a zero trust approach is the best path for organizations seeking to balance performance and security. Read more at Security Week.