Organisations around the world are increasingly embracing hybrid and remote working practices on a full-time basis as they resume business as usual. And, as businesses support an increasingly dispersed workforce with more flexible environments, they’re being afforded new opportunities.

Businesses that offer their employees remote or hybrid work environments can now access a wider talent pool by eliminating geographic restrictions. However, each benefit arguably comes with its own equal, opposite detriment. In many cases, the expansion of the digital working environment and underlying network has given rise to an equally expanding attack surface that cybercriminals can exploit.

Consequently, companies can no longer afford to rely on traditional cybersecurity measures such as firewalls or external network walls when large numbers of employees and devices operate outside the bounds of the network. To mitigate this risk, it’s essential that companies invest in a zero trust security approach, like Fortinet’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), to protect their environment.

There are three essential benefits that solutions like ZTNA afford businesses:

  1. Secure access: zero trust means what it says on the box; it assumes that there are no implicit areas of trust and every single connected device or user is potentially compromised. Zero trust lets organisations maintain strict levels of access security by requiring continuous authorisation and verification for every access request as well as requiring authentication before granting network access.
  2. Comprehensive protection: zero trust is designed to keep networks secure regardless of when devices and workers operate external to the organisational architecture. Compared to other cybersecurity methods, zero trust is uniquely capable of meeting the needs of a dispersed working environment, making it the only comprehensive and effective solution available to properly secure remote devices and workers.
  3. Enhanced flexibility: a zero trust approach delivers the flexibility required to support an agile, distributed workforce, as it can operate with either hybrid, cloud-based, or local networks and does not rely on a traditional network edge. As a result, a zero trust approach can be trusted to take security to the network edge, wherever that edge is, letting organisations embrace remote and hybrid work environments without sacrificing security.

Many organisations may have previously been reluctant to embrace a zero trust approach because of its perceived high cost. However, as cyberattackers grow increasingly more sophisticated and the potential attack surface expands, taking a zero trust approach to cybersecurity has become one of the most cost-effective solutions available by virtue of its ability to secure the network, and help reduce the potential financial impacts of a major cyberbreach.

ZTNA is available as part of Fortinet’s FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), which makes it uniquely flexible, covering users regardless of if they are working remotely or in the office. Fortinet and Wavelink work closely to secure enterprise, service provider, and government organisations around the world. Wavelink is the leading specialist distributor and has been providing complementary technology solutions to distributor channels across Australia and New Zealand for the last 20 years.

For more information on how Wavelink can help secure your organisation with the support of the comprehensive Fortinet ZTNA solution, contact the team today: sales@wavelink.com.au