1 Introduction
Doing business in nearly every industry nowadays is impossible without Digital Transformation. Organizations are increasingly becoming hyperconnected, relying on multiple cloud services, as well as expanding their mobile and remote workforces. Always-on, reliable, and secure network connectivity is a critical factor of business continuity. As the very notion of the corporate network perimeter has all but disappeared, traditional security tools like firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) can no longer ensure an adequate level of security, compliance, scalability, or productivity, forcing businesses to look for more modern alternatives.
Unsurprisingly, Zero Trust (ZT) has gained massive traction in recent years as a strategic approach that eliminates any implicit trust between users and resources, strictly enforces the principle of the least privilege, and minimizes the overall attack surface. The recent pandemic has dramatically accelerated ZT adoption, and regulations in countries like the United States even mandate such architectures for government agencies.
By creating a logical identity- and context-based overlay over existing untrusted networks and preventing discovery and access of applications for unauthorized users, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions enforce dynamic, fine-grained access policies bound to specific authenticated identities, trusted endpoint devices, and specific applications and other resources. This approach not only ensures continuous visibility, governance, and compliance for accessing sensitive data, but also prevents lateral movement of malware and malicious actors, substantially reducing the risk of data breaches and ransomware attacks.
Compared to VPN solutions, ZTNA architectures offer a much more frictionless and productive user experience for users, enabling such scenarios as transparent application migration, seamless multi-cloud connectivity, or agentless access from unmanaged devices. For administrators, they offer a clear separation between control and data planes, with a broad range of deployment options for on-premises, cloud, industrial, or even air-gapped architectures. Finally, for security professionals, they offer centralized visibility, integrated security controls, and integrations with forensic and incident response tools.
ZTNA is the key technology that enables modern Zero Trust architectures, together with comprehensive identity management, strong multi-factor authentication, and real-time behavior analytics. The market continues to evolve and grow rapidly. Veteran vendors and startups are offering a multitude of solutions to address various usage scenarios: simplified cloud migration, seamless hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, or a modern replacement for VPN.
Some of these use cases imply a massively scalable architecture that can accommodate complex traffic patterns between thousands of cloud workloads. Others benefit from a fully managed offering delivered as a service. For others still, the ultimate deployment flexibility across hybrid environments is a crucial factor. Whether such scenarios place more focus on adaptive access management, threat protection, data loss prevention, or security analytics can also greatly affect the choice of the most appropriate solution for your specific ZTNA project.
The KuppingerCole’s Leadership Compass on Zero Trust Network Access alone covers 30 solutions catering to different customers and even having radically different architectures. Finding a product that is the right fit for your specific requirements and pain points can be challenging. Even more difficult, however, is the challenge for a vendor that decides to enter this crowded market to find a unique differentiator for its new ZTNA solution.
In this paper, we are looking at Invisily, a Zero Trust Network Access solution that recently launched in a limited preview. The company behind the product positions it as a universal platform for any deployment scenario, addressing the shortcomings of existing products and offering new unique capabilities, and placing a strong emphasis on adopting Zero Trust in a simple, unobtrusive, and painless fashion.
