Today’s threat landscape is marked by increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Ransomware incidents grew by 18% in 2024, while the Dark Angels cybercrime group walked away from a single attack with a payout of $75 million. Ransomware-as-a-service is growing in popularity and zero-day attacks continue to be unleashed at a rapid pace. There is a clear rise in phishing, and the malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI) is bypassing traditional security measures. All of this sets a hazardous stage for any organization trying to keep itself safe. Business decision-makers and IT leaders are now well aware of the effects of these risks. From disrupted operations and regulatory non-compliance to legal fees and customer churn, the impact of falling prey to any cyberattack is significant. Security teams are under immense pressure to adopt strategies and systems that stave off evolving risks. The successful ones choose zero trust architecture rather than the network-centric, perimeter-based security models that are unequipped to face the threats of the digital era. Traditional security models: What’s the risk? With a perimeter-based architecture, security, and connectivity revolve around a trusted network that is extended to users, devices, sites, clouds, and applications. This network extension is done in order to provide users and other entities with access to the IT r sources connected to that network. Naturally, this produces a sprawling flat network that is vulnerable to cyberattacks. So, to protect it, organizations deploy appliances like firewalls and virtual private networks (VPNs) in an attempt to establish a security perimeter that keeps bad things out and good things in. This network-centric architecture was designed for a simpler, on-premises-only, bygone era. It is not well suited to our digital world with its work-from-anywhere users and its countless cloud applications hosted off-premises. In fact, when organizations cling to this old-school architecture while embracing remote work and the cloud, it creates significant problems. And even when tools like firewalls and VPNs are deployed as virtual appliances in the cloud, the underlying methodology and its fundamental flaws remain the same. By nature, perimeter-based architectures: Expand your attack surface: Endlessly extending your network to users, apps, devices, clouds, and locations, and using tools with public IP addresses, like firewalls, results in a ballooning network with countless entry points ripe for exploitation. Failure to prevent compromise: Perimeter-based security solutions like firewall appliances struggle to inspect encrypted web traffic at scale, perform cursory traffic scanning ratherthan full inspection, and ultimately enable threats to pass through defenses. Enable lateral threat movement: Once malicious entities have made it past your defenses and accessed your network, they can move laterally throughout it and accessthe resources connected to it, expanding the reach of their breaches. Are unable to stop data loss: As mentioned above, network-centric tools struggle to inspect encrypted traffic; additionally, they are not designed to secure data leakagepaths like SaaS apps, endpoints, private apps, and more. As such, they are often unable to stop data loss. In addition to these four major weaknesses, network-centric models have other challenges. First, they increase IT complexity through stacks of networking and security appliances, which, regardless of whether they are deployed as hardware or virtual appliances, contribute to convoluted IT infrastructure. Next, managing a complex fleet of point products and appliances requires a significant amount of time from administrators. This, when combined with the technologies’ purchase prices and the expensive private connections needed for traditional networking, leads to significant costs. Finally, when traffic has to be backhauled to a distant data center or virtual appliance for security and connectivity, the added latency harms user experience and, as a result, impedes productivity. Zero trust architecture: Why it’s the modern security standard Zero trust represents a stark departure from the perimeter-based model and is a fundamentally distinct architecture. It successfully decouples security and connectivity from your network through a cloud native platform that acts as an intelligent switchboard and delivers secure any-to-any connectivity as a service at the edge—without extending network access to anyone or anything. As such, zero trust avoids the excessive permissions and implicit trust of traditional models that connect entities to the network. Granular, least-privileged access directly to IT resources is enforced through context-based policies that assess risk and respond accordingly. It’s a more intelligent approach to security that lacks the manifold weaknesses of firewalls and VPNs. Zero trust architecture enables you to: Minimize your attack surface: Direct-to-app connectivity circumvents the need for endless network extension, while firewalls and their public IPs are eliminated. Instead of inbound connections, zero trust uses inside-out connections (a connector sitting in front of the app reaches out to the zero trust cloud, which then stitches the connection together). All of this shrinks your attack surface and, as a result, the potential for a breach to ever begin. Prevent compromise: Zero trust is delivered through a proxy-based architecture that performs full traffic inspection in order to stop attacks in real time. With a cloud native platform that boasts a high degree of performance, it can even inspect encrypted traffic at scale; this is critical because more than 95% of web traffic today is encrypted, and more threats are hiding within said traffic than ever before. Eliminate lateral threat movement: As mentioned previously, zero trust provides least-privileged access through direct-to-app connectivity. When no entities areconnected to your corporate network as a whole, no one (and no thing) can move laterally within it, access its various connected resources, or expand the blast radius of a cyber breach. Stop data loss: When zero trust is delivered through a high-performance, cloud native platform, you can fully inspect all of your traffic, including encrypted traffic at scale, and prevent data loss therein. Additionally, comprehensively securing any-to-any connectivity while ensuring granular, least-privileged access to data means that a zero trust platform can secure sensitive information and any possible leakage path. Beyond these four core benefits of zero trust, the architecture provides additional advantages that eliminate other issues inherent to perimeter-based architectures. First, zero trust secures any-to-any connectivity with a breadth of functionality, circumvents
