Updated: Sep 26, 2025
A Bengaluru fintech found that stolen credentials opened a path to its payment sandbox, then to test data. The VPN accepted the login, the flat network did the rest. If you still treat a password and a tunnel as proof of trust, you carry avoidable risk every day.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) replaces implicit trust with continuous verification. It treats identity and device state as the new perimeter, checks policy on every request, and narrows access to a single app, not a whole network. The question is not whether to adopt it; the question is how to land it without theatre or bloat.
Create a live inventory. Catalogue workforce identities, human and service. List contractors and vendors by company and role. Pull device data from your MDM and EDR, note ownership and compliance state. Build an application register, SaaS and private, and label data sensitivity. You cannot set least privilege before you define who needs what, from which device, and for which task. Update this map weekly, treat it as a control, not a spreadsheet.
Move to phishing-resistant MFA, such as FIDO2 or passkeys, and retire SMS codes. Use your identity provider (IdP) to enforce step-up challenges on risk signals, location change, or new device. Tie access to device posture, verified by EDR or MDM, with checks for disk encryption, OS version, and sensor health. Block unknown devices, quarantine stale accounts, and rotate service tokens.
Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report notes that use of stolen credentials remains a leading path into firms, year after year. Treat identity assurance and device health as first-class controls, not gatekeepers you bypass in a crunch.
Ditch broad VPN access. Publish private apps through a ZTNA broker, create per-app, per-user tunnels that grant the minimum needed path. Apply role-based policies, map job roles to groups, and review group sprawl. In the data centre, use microsegmentation to restrict east-west traffic, and apply 802.1X on the campus edge to bind identity to a switch port. For branches, pair ZTNA with SSE so Internet traffic takes local breakouts under policy. Every rule you tighten reduces lateral movement and blast radius.
Session risk changes as behaviour changes. Stream IdP, ZTNA, endpoint, and DNS logs into your XDR. Use UEBA to baseline normal access and flag outliers, such as impossible travel, data exfiltration to unknown domains, or service accounts used from user laptops. Inspect TLS where policy allows, record queries at the DNS layer, and keep audit trails for SaaS admin actions. Measure MTTD and MTTR weekly, and tie your ZTNA posture checks to those outcomes.
Write playbooks that act without a ticket. If device health drops, cut access to sensitive apps, force re-auth, and open a case with full context. If the XDR tags an endpoint as compromised, isolate it, revoke tokens, and expire sessions on SaaS. Treat policy as code, version it, peer review it, and test it in staging. Run quarterly access reviews that include contractors and service identities, not just employees. Add just-in-time access for admin tasks so standing privileges fade by default.
Do not copy flat VPN groups into your ZTNA rules. Do not grant network-level access to reach a single legacy app; front it with a connector. Do not skip device checks for “urgent” access; the exception becomes the norm. Do not ignore SaaS logs; many breaches start with weak admin hygiene. Do not run ZTNA as a security-only project; bring network, identity, and app owners to the table.
Most partners sell point tools. You need an operating model. Proactive designs ZTNA as a fabric across identity, endpoint, network, and cloud. We stage pilots app by app, we codify policy, and we wire telemetry into your XDR so your SOC sees and acts in one place. As a long-standing Cisco Gold Partner, we deploy Duo for MFA, Secure Access for ZTNA and SSE, and Secure Client on endpoints, yet we tune the build for your stack, from factories in Pune to delivery centres in Gurugram. The result: fewer gaps, cleaner audits, and faster response.
Credential theft will not wait. Regulators expect proof of continuous control. Your choice is simple: keep extending a VPN that assumes trust, or move to ZTNA that verifies identity and device on every request and limits access to the minimum. If you want a plan that lands in 90 days, with measurable risk reduction, Proactive will draft it with you, run the pilot, and scale it across sites without drama.
