Universal ZTNA: Today’s Answer To Tomorrow’s Challenges

Bringing together zero trust with network access control, without increasing complexity or licensing overheads is a game changer.

Businesses today are facing challenges on various fronts for secure, easy access to information resources, from anywhere, on anything, and any time. Not just for end users, new services, applications, and partnerships also demand the access and availability that now characterize the modern, digital, and increasingly distributed enterprise.

To facilitate such access, zero trust as a broad approach has been seen as the most appropriate means. When it comes to the network, zero trust network access (ZTNA) is the methodology that has resulted. This is seen as a key step on the way to achieving a secure access service edge (SASE) solution.

However, while many vendors have been able to offer some kind of ZTNA at the application level, and cloud network access control (NAC) at the device level, few have been able to fully integrate both.

Single Solution

“A lot of our competitors have NAC solutions, have ZTNA solutions, or have both, but they’ve not actually combined them into a single solution,” said Dan DeBacker, senior VP, product management, Extreme Networks. Acknowledging competitors’ capabilities, DeBacker continues, “but there’s multiple parts and pieces that make it very difficult.”

“If you go to any one of our competitors, and our customer wants to implement NAC, and they want to implement the ZTNA, they have to buy two products — so that’s a cost. They have to license two products, then they have to implement and manage two products in addition to managing their infrastructure,” he said. “That’s three different things.”

“You want your network to have security capability in and of itself,” said Swain in an interview. “We have the Universal ZTNA to be part of a greater holistic control framework, and that’s why it’s an obvious next step in network evolutions.”

ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA (UZTNA) uniquely offers one solution that combines and enhances the best of campus and remote access security for today’s work models.

According to Extreme Networks’ CISO Phil Swain, the network is no longer a separate piece but a critical part of the security control toolkit.

The Key Benefits of ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA, include:

• The ability to establish and maintain a consistent security policy while enforcing an identity-level zero-trust policy across the network, with a single solution.

• A subscription-based service, as part of ExtremeCloud and priced by the number of users across the network, which reduces costs and increases operational efficiency, avoiding the need for multiple licenses and offering scalability.

• As a cloud-based solution, ExtremeCloud Universal ZTNA empowers IT teams to actively manage user networks and applications, guests, and IoT devices access over diverse environments, with deployment times of less than a day, featuring automated onboarding, and configuration for all Extreme Universal Platforms.

UZTNA continues our drive to reduce complexity, improve capability, and manage costs for business. Through the unified management experience, licensing cost, and simplicity of UZTNA, JT Tech can offer an unparalleled service to businesses that meets the needs of today’s threats and user demands, while ensuring that IT teams are not further burdened with implementation, management, and licensing overheads.

Fill IT Security Gaps

Through UZTNA, users can establish and maintain consistent security policy across the network with one solution to manage and enforce identity-level zero trust policy for employees, guests, contractors, and IoT devices. UZTNA integration with MDM solutions such as MS Intune, and enables augmented access decisions linked to granular device health and authentication capabilities.

Quick Time to Value

Users can deploy and scale quickly via a SaaS integrated with identity providers such as Google Workspace and Azure AD to accelerate employee onboarding and automated device configuration minimize setup time.

Operational and Cost Efficiency

The UZTNA solution reduces complexity with simplified security management delivered through a single subscription. It eliminates the need for additional platforms with inclusion of radius as a service.

Simplified for Distributed Enterprise

IDC’s Brandon Butler, research manager, enterprise networks, said in a supporting statement, “In the era of the hyper-distributed enterprise, users and devices access the enterprise network from everywhere and rely on enterprise applications that can be hosted anywhere. As vulnerabilities continue to rise and IoT device growth continues to increase, managing security, performance and scale can be complex.”

“Extreme’s Universal ZTNA aims to provide a simplified, cloud-managed solution for controlling universal network access, using zero-trust principles to help customers meet the network security needs of their distributed digital enterprise,” said Butler.

Talk to us now about how we can integrate Universal ZTNA into your network.