Virtual private network (VPN) usage soared in March 2020 as employers sought to connect a growing number of homebound employees to company resources.

But limitations of VPNs—namely, drawbacks in security and scalability—have left an opening for a technology area known as “zero-trust network access” (ZTNA), according to industry consultants.

VPN’d

While a VPN provides an encrypted tunnel to a network, its benefits don’t always impress IT pros.

• Scalability: The road gets crowded—and network performance potentially degraded—when a whole work-from-home workforce bottlenecks to the same destination. “If you’re going to scale big and you’re going to want lots of people coming in remotely, there are much more cost-effective approaches,” said Dan Lohrmann, field CISO at the IT services provider Presidio.
• Security: A tunneled device is not within your direct control, said Paddy Harrington, senior analyst at Forrester. “Sure, business traffic goes down the VPN, but internet traffic heads out my home network,” Harrington told IT Brew. “Well, what else on that home network could jump onto my device and then go on across the business network?”

Gartner sees a growing interest in the area of technologies known as ZTNA.

“Most organizations adopting ZTNA services are looking beyond VPN approaches due to the spike in remote working, combined with unmanaged device usage,” the consultancy said in a report updated in April 2022.

ZTNA: not a warrior princess

“Zero trust,” according to Forrester, is an information security model that denies access to applications and data by default, where “Threat prevention is achieved by only granting access to networks and workloads utilizing policy informed by continuous, contextual, risk-based verification across users and their associated devices.”

In other words: User access is limited to explicitly authorized applications.

If a VPN is the tunnel that hides your car, zero trust sends a few boxes from the trunk rather than the whole Buick—directly to the person on the other side, while checking along the way to make sure that what’s said to be in the boxes is really in the boxes, said Harrington, who considers ZTNA to be a “really good” replacement for traditional VPNs.

“It’s connecting at an application level, versus at a device level,” Harrington told IT Brew. “So, it’s not just saying ‘you can only get to web apps’…it’s saying, ‘If I’m going to set up a connection from your endpoint to the business network, it’s going to be restricted to this particular application, talking to this set of application servers in this set of data in this location.”

Read the rest here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @BillyHurls on Twitter.

The biggest difficulty about turning a widget factory into a smart manufacturing powerhouse might not be setting up an industrial IoT or upgrading production lines. It could be…spreadsheets.

At its core, smart manufacturing and infrastructure is all about data, and the integration of IT and OT is the foundation to get there. Yet the biggest challenges enterprises might face aren’t technical, experts told IT Brew. They’re human.

Data interoperability? You wish!

Jonathan Lang, IDC Manufacturing Insights’ research manager, who runs worldwide surveys on IT/OT convergence, said companies commonly cite security and compatibility as their biggest concerns. But the most serious issue, he told IT Brew, can be reams of indecipherable, sometimes ancient spreadsheets.

“The software systems, the controls, the SCADA systems, the different historian systems, and other sorts of data stores that, in an OT environment, when those systems were originally purchased, configured, set up, and so forth, there wasn’t any sort of data governance, there weren’t many standards then,” Lang said. “Even the individuals that set those systems up and configure those systems…had no appreciation or no future view into the way that this data would be consumed.”

For example, Lang said, three engineers in the same department might have three totally different ways of logging data. This can naturally frustrate IT teams who traditionally manage big data and understandably hope it’s at least in a comprehensible format.

“When you have data that’s been historically configured basically in Morse code that an individual engineer understands because they’re the ones who set the system, and they’ve traditionally exported that data into an Excel spreadsheet and run their own process to collate, and organize, and decipher this data,” Lang said, “What you end up with today is…totally incomprehensible.”

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected] or DM @thetomzone on Twitter. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

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