Reading time: 5 mins 5 sec | Published: January 25, 2025
Universal ZTNA What is universal ZTNA?
Universal Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) is an evolved form of ZTNA that extends secure access principles to encompass all types of users and devices across an organization's entire IT ecosystem. Unlike traditional ZTNA, which often focuses on remote users, universal ZTNA provides consistent and seamless security controls, for all users and devices, including IoT, regardless of whether they are on-premises or located remotely. By adopting a holistic approach, universal ZTNA ensures secure access to all organizational resources from anywhere and any device while maintaining strict zero trust principles.
How does universal ZTNA work?
Universal ZTNA operates on the fundamental principles of zero trust, which require continuous verification of users and devices before granting access to specific resources. Here’s how it typically works:
- Authentication and authorization: Universal ZTNA begins by verifying the identity of users and devices attempting to access resources. This is achieved through multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other identity verification techniques. User roles, device health, and contextual factors such as location and time of access are evaluated to determine authorization.
- Policy enforcement: Once authenticated, the user or device is granted access only to the specific applications or resources for which they are authorized. Policies are defined centrally and applied uniformly across all environments, ensuring consistent access control. Policies may include additional conditions, such as requiring endpoint security solutions to be active or restricting access from high-risk locations.
- Granular access control: Unlike traditional network access solutions, universal ZTNA ensures users never gain broad network access. Instead, access is granted on a per-resource basis, minimizing the attack surface. Internal services remain hidden from public exposure, reducing the risk of exploitation by malicious actors.
- Continuous monitoring and verification: Universal ZTNA solutions continuously monitor user activity and device behavior. Suspicious activities trigger alerts or result in immediate termination of access. This dynamic approach allows organizations to adapt to evolving threats in real time.
- Integration with existing systems: Universal ZTNA integrates seamlessly with identity and access management (IAM) systems, security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools to enhance security posture.
Why should I consider universal ZTNA?
The rapid expansion of remote work, cloud adoption, and IoT redefines enterprise boundaries as users and devices connect from anywhere, while putting more data at the edge to protect, making universal ZTNA a necessity. Here are key reasons why your organization should consider adopting universal ZTNA:
- Comprehensive coverage: Unlike traditional ZTNA solutions, universal ZTNA secures access for all types of devices, remote or on-premises, and extends zero trust principles to unmanaged and IoT devices, ensuring no endpoint becomes a security loophole.
- Enhanced security: Universal ZTNA mitigates risks by eliminating implicit trust and ensuring continuous verification for every access request. It hides internal services from public exposure, reducing the likelihood of unauthorized access.
- Scalability and flexibility: The cloud-native architecture of universal ZTNA allows organizations to scale security operations effortlessly, accommodating growing teams and evolving IT landscapes. It supports hybrid work environments, ensuring secure access for remote employees and third-party collaborators.
- Operational efficiency: Centralized policy management simplifies the enforcement of access controls across multiple environments. Integration with existing IAM, SIEM, and EDR systems enhances visibility and reduces administrative overhead.
- Compliance and governance: By providing detailed access logs and monitoring capabilities, universal ZTNA helps organizations meet regulatory requirements and maintain audit readiness. It enables the enforcement of data protection policies, ensuring sensitive information remains secure.
Benefits of universal ZTNA
Universal ZTNA offers a wide range of benefits that make it a valuable addition to modern IT security strategies. Here’s an overview of the key advantages:
- Reduced attack surface: Universal ZTNA limits access to specific resources, ensuring users and devices only interact with what they are authorized to access. This approach minimizes opportunities for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities.
- Improved user experience: By providing seamless and consistent access controls, universal ZTNA eliminates the need for users to navigate multiple security tools or workflows. This ensures productivity isn’t hampered by security measures.
- Protection for unmanaged devices: Universal ZTNA extends security to unmanaged devices such as IoT, BYOD, and guest devices. This ensures that even non-traditional endpoints are safeguarded against potential threats.
- Simplified policy management: Centralized policy management enables IT teams to define and enforce access controls across diverse environments without needing multiple tools or platforms.
- Adaptability to evolving threats: With continuous monitoring and real-time verification, universal ZTNA detects and mitigates threats proactively, adapting to new attack vectors as they emerge.
- Support for hybrid work models: As organizations embrace hybrid work environments, universal ZTNA ensures secure access for remote employees, contractors, and third-party vendors, enabling business continuity.
- Regulatory compliance: Universal ZTNA provides the visibility and control needed to meet stringent regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
HPE Aruba Networking and universal ZTNA
HPE Aruba Networking provides a comprehensive platform that goes far beyond the narrow focus of traditional solutions, which often address only specific areas of zero trust protection. With our Edge-to-Cloud Zero Trust platform, we deliver a seamless integration of a single-vendor SASE solution and advanced machine learning-based NAC capabilities. This approach empowers organizations to adopt a universal ZTNA approach, applying zero trust principles consistently across all devices, whether they are remote or on-premises.
The HPE Aruba Networking Edge-to-Cloud Zero Trust platform
The journey begins with securing remote users: ZTNA replaces outdated VPNs by offering secure access to private resources while simplifying operations. The solution’s agentless option enables third-party users to connect securely, reducing third-party risk and ensuring seamless collaboration. To enhance protection further, Secure Web Gateway (SWG) features guard endpoints from web-based threats, while Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities ensure safe access to SaaS applications and prevent data leakage.
As zero trust principles extend to campus and branch locations, HPE Aruba Networking’s ZTNA Private Edge ensures that on-premises traffic remains local. This eliminates inefficient hairpin routing to the cloud while enforcing consistent access control policies for both remote and local users.
The solution provides deep network visibility, leveraging advanced machine learning to profile devices with up to 99% accuracy, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which are often the weakest link in enterprise networks.
By defining a global zero trust policy in HPE Aruba Networking Central, organizations can enforce access controls across all endpoints via the embedded firewalls in CX switches, access points, and EdgeConnect SD-WAN. For data centers, the CX 10000 switch offers groundbreaking zero trust segmentation and east-west firewalling, eliminating the need for inefficient traffic hair-pinning to traditional hardware appliances.
The HPE Aruba Networking Edge-to-Cloud Zero Trust platform continuously monitors the network and adapts trust levels in real time through built-in features such as Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS). AI-powered Network Detection and Response (NDR) capabilities further strengthen security by identifying abnormal behavior and precisely detecting threats such as ransomware attacks. These capabilities are fueled by extensive training data from nearly 4 million devices and over 1 billion client interactions, providing high levels of threat detection and response accuracy.
The platform provides a holistic approach to zero trust, enabling organizations to protect their networks, users, and data across every layer and location of their infrastructure. From remote users to IoT devices, branch locations, and data centers, this platform delivers unmatched security, visibility, and efficiency in an increasingly complex threat landscape.
Universal ZTNA vs ZTNA
While traditional ZTNA and universal ZTNA share core zero trust principles, they differ in scope, functionality, and applicability. ZTNA focuses on remote users, while universal ZTNA extends zero trust principles on-premises to protect all users and devices. It is worth noting that the original intent of ZTNA was broader and not focusing solely on remote users.
Universal ZTNA emerges as a more comprehensive solution for organizations looking to standardize security across diverse IT environments. By addressing the limitations of traditional ZTNA, it provides a unified and scalable approach to secure access.
Here’s a comparison to highlight their distinctions:
Designation | Traditional ZTNA | Universal ZTNA |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Focus on remote users. | Covers all users, devices and applications. |
| Application support | Primarily supports web and SaaS applications. | Supports on-prem, cloud, hybrid, legacy, and SaaS. |
| Device coverage | Limited to managed devices. | Extends to unmanaged devices, including IoT. |
| Access control | Resource-level access for specific applications. | Consistent access control across the entire ecosystem. |
| Scalability | May require additional tools for large environments. | Cloud-native architecture for seamless scalability. |
| Flexibility | Less adaptable to modern hybrid work environments. | Designed to accommodate diverse and distributed workforces. |
