ZTNA Connector Automates Secure Access to Private Apps

A new era of operational simplicity and blazing-fast speed for private app access

The current economic uncertainties and ongoing inflationary concerns have compelled businesses to embrace a cloud-first strategy to better respond to changing business and macroeconomic conditions. According to Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.

Cloud technology has had a profound impact on how applications are developed and deployed. The flexible and elastic nature of cloud technologies combined with containerized applications have allowed app developers to deploy apps more quickly and easily. As a result, we’re seeing companies publishing multitudes of private applications to help propel their businesses forward, attract and retain customers, and keep their employees connected to the data they need to work.

However, one big question still needs to be solved. How can organizations ensure these cloud-based, private app connections are secure?

Organizations face challenges trying to securely connect employees to modern private apps

There are a number of challenges organizations face trying to securely connect their employees to their ever-expanding roster of private applications. These challenges include:

1. The ability to provide consistent security for private apps. Private apps are spread across multi-cloud environments and within on-premises data centers, making it difficult to mitigate a data breach or unexpected exposure.
2. A wide range of operations complexities, including:
   • How to connect hybrid users and branch locations to private applications hosted in multi-cloud and on-premises data centers.
   • Managing the excessive manual labor and planning to facilitate private app access in overlapped private or partner networks that result from mergers and acquisitions or partner alliances.
   • Risk exposure from the rapid deployment of new applications and workloads in public cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure without corporate knowledge or control.
3. Slow and inconsistent connections make private app access unpredictable, negatively impact the overall user experience, and hampers business agility.

Cloud-first organizations need to accommodate their application developers’ high-speed innovation while ensuring consistent security and optimal performance for all private applications.

Prisma Access ZTNA Connector for private app access

Prisma® Access ZTNA Connector delivers consistent security while streamlining and simplifying access to private applications hosted in cloud environments, private-cloud data centers, and on-premises data centers. ZTNA Connector provides industry-leading scalability and auto-app discovery to securely connect organizations to all of their private applications.

ZTNA Connector can automatically discover and onboard private applications into Prisma Access, providing deep enterprise application understanding to specify access policies in alignment with the principle of least privilege.

These latest enhancements to ZTNA Connector enable cloud-first businesses to support their app developers while staying in control of connecting their hybrid workforces to their private apps by delivering:

1. Consistent, best-in-class security for all apps and data. ZTNA Connector provides the superior protection of ZTNA 2.0, including AI/ML-powered in-line protections to safeguard against even the most sophisticated and persistent threats, while providing full DLP support to protect all data from accidental or intentional exfiltration attempts.
2. Operational simplicity, scalability, and enterprise flexibility. ZTNA Connector fully supports auto app discovery and onboarding of private applications into Prisma Access, including automated tunnel management and routing, overlapped private networks, streamlining merger and acquisition operations, partner network application access.
3. Higher throughput private app access. ZTNA Connector provides the ability to automatically scale to handle up to 10 Gbps throughput while leveraging the combined footprint of the largest hyperscale cloud service providers (CSPs) in the world, ensuring the highest-performing connectivity to all enterprise private apps with minimal latency, backed by industry-leading service license agreements (SLAs).

Check out our on-demand event, "Prisma SASE: AI-Powered Innovation Takes Center Stage," to find out more about the ZTNA Connector and the future of AI-powered SASE.