Axis Security: Simplifying Secure Access for the Modern Enterprise

Traditional Secure Access Approaches Have Difficulty Addressing the Distributed Enterprise

The number of applications used in today’s enterprise has exploded. In fact, 62% of those surveyed indicate their organization supports at least 250 business applications.¹ Though some of these applications may still be located in an on- premises data center, they are increasingly likely to be delivered via software-as-a-service (SaaS) or hosted in a public cloud. Additionally, employees, partners, and contractors are often accessing these applications from outside the corporate network, further complicating the dynamic. This trend has certainly been accelerated by the pandemic, but most enterprises anticipate that employees will continue to work at least part-time outside of corporate locations even after the crisis subsides. Specifically, 79% of IT decision makers anticipate more work-from-home flexibility moving forward.²

Historically, remote users have accessed corporate applications through a virtual private network (VPN). When applications resided in the corporate data center and a limited number of employees were only rarely accessing those applications remotely, this made sense architecturally, if not from a security perspective. Over the years, many companies have added virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud access security brokers (CASBs) to secure access to the different types of applications across their organization. However, this disjointed approach cannot effectively address today’s distributed environment for several reasons, including complexity, security, performance, and cost (see Figure 1).³

Complexity. The VPN model is difficult to scale to external users such as partners, contractors, and newly acquired companies, especially in a time-efficient manner. Additionally, while VPN, CASB, and especially VDI can introduce complexity in their own right, navigating the deployment, configuration, and management of these tools when used simultaneously for secure access only exacerbates the issue. Managing the licenses, infrastructure and endpoint requirements, as well as integrations with visibility, workflow, and response tools across these access solutions can lead to inefficiencies and ultimately ineffectiveness.

Security. VPNs provide broad network-level access, potentially allowing users to access much more than just the intended application—a model that does not align with the zero-trust strategy many organizations have begun to embrace. While adding CASB and VDI may provide more granular control, maintaining policy and visibility consistency across multiple secure access tools is difficult and can ultimately reduce the level of security effectiveness.

Performance and user experience. The VPN model requires remote user traffic to be backhauled to on-premises appliances, only to be routed back out to the cloud, which can introduce latency and impact performance. When used in conjunction with VDI, the user may be forced to access different applications using different methods—for example, connecting through a VPN gateway for Salesforce access, and using a VDI workspace for internal applications, rather than directly accessing all applications natively and transparently.

Cost. During the initial shift to remote work, the stress put on on-premises appliances including VPN concentrators, firewalls, and intrusion prevention systems forced some organizations to increase capacity or ration access, resulting in either unanticipated capital expenditures or poor user experiences. The appliance-centric nature of VPNs also makes it an expensive model to maintain. Adding VDI for remote access use cases only increases cost and complexity, with both a virtual desktop infrastructure and a VDI-associated network access gateway to provision and scale. Organizations using multiple tools are likely to spend more on both procurement and operations. In all cases, the costs associated with traditional approaches can be significant.

Figure 1. Top Secure Access Challenges

What are the biggest issues your organization faces with regard to securing employee access to corporate applications and resources? (Percent of respondents, N=376, three responses accepted)