As businesses take advantage of mobile workforce and consumers, they have also been actively migrating their data centers and “webifying” applications to the cloud. To this end, security professionals have been building out an application-based access security architecture called Software Defined Perimeter (SDP). SDP leverages the Zero Trust tenet of ‘never trust, always verify’ by essentially enabling secure access directly between the user and their device to the application and resource no matter the underlying infrastructure – but in a scalable way and according to policy. In a sense, SDP enables Secure Access elasticity as users gain easy means for access protection which travels with them everywhere they go, with what devices they use, and wherever the application resides.
According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group survey:
- 66% of organizations expect that within two years, more than 30% of their cloud-resident data will be sensitive
- 53% of mobile knowledge workers wait at least a week before applying a security patch or update to the devices they use for work
- 45% of organizations that have repatriated a public cloud-based application(s)/workload(s) have deployed them on converged infrastructure
Ubiquitous access to applications and dynamic resource provisioning are the new normal, yielding an increase in advanced threats and massive data breaches. As enterprises embrace digital transformation and migrate their applications and infrastructure to multi-cloud, access requirements have become more stringent and complex to prevent attacks and data leakage. To reduce risk, organizations are applying a Zero Trust strategy of “verification before trust” by incorporating stronger user and device authentication, granular access control, and enhanced segmentation no matter where the application and resources reside.
Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO at Pulse Secure:
“Business leaders face a digital imperative to boost user productivity, while also mitigating the risk of data breaches that are growing in size and frequency. From our inception, we have focused on providing a pragmatic approach to Zero Trust Secure Access that balances user experience with compliance. By incorporating SDP architecture within our Access Suite, we can deliver the deployment flexibility, scale and investment protection sought by enterprises and service providers. Think of Zero Trust as a security model and SDP as the upcoming security architecture that companies will use to manage access security for hybrid IT.”
