Sophos says that integration to their endpoint solution will provide much easier deployment and more effectiveness than similar solutions.
Cybersecurity vendor Sophos has launched Sophos ZTNA [Zero Trust Network Access]. While there are now many ZTNA offerings on the market, Sophos’ differentiation is that it is fully integrated with a next-generation endpoint solution – Sophos Intercept X. The result is that it is able to provide advanced endpoint protection and zero trust network access with a single agent.
“ZTNA is the latest and most secure of remote access solutions over the year – from original simple authentication through IPSEC and VPN,” said Joe Levy, Chief Technology and Products Officer at Sophos. “This was all done in house. We have been working on it for a couple of years now.”
By itself, Sophos ZTNA features a transparent and scalable security model for connecting users and devices to applications and data, to improve and simplify protection against ransomware and other advanced cybersecurity threats. However, as part of the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem and linked by Sophos Central management, Sophos ZTNA shares real-time threat intelligence with other solutions and automatically responds to threats. This lets the ecosystem better identify active threats and assess device health.
“ZTNA generally acquires some kind of agent on an endpoint,” Levy said. “But we have agent overload today. An advantage we have as an endpoint vendor that the networking vendors don’t is the ability to simplify the deployment with the tick of a box. We can also leverage all the intelligence of Intercept X on both the protection and detection sides, so we can do things like dynamically revoke access to a resource if something unwanted happened on that endpoint. Then we can simplify overall management with Sophos Central.”
Levy also stressed that ZTNA is highly effective against ransomware.
“As an antidote to ransomware, it is very apt, because it provides better granularity and better access control,” he said. It’s providing easier MFA limits the ability for attackers to move laterally in an environment, which limits their ability to succeed. Some customers are victims of ransomware because they have not had their MFA configured.”
Levy said that the Sophos ZTNA is simple for partners to work with, and will be available to all partners as a result.
“Anyone who has a basic familiarity with publishing a resource to the internet through the firewall will be able to deploy ZTNA,” he said. “So every partner has access. ZTNA has actually had availability since early in January, and it is being used in production environment today, Partners have told us that it is easier to set up, easier to get it to play on the endpoints, and easier to administer, through Sophos Central.”
Sophos ZTNA is not yet available as a service today, but Levy said that’s coming.
“With SASE, everything will be consumed as a service, including ZTNA, so we are looking to deploy it in an even simpler manner by deploying it as a service. Everything is getting ‘as-a-serviceified’ at this point.”
