Fortra's Holistic Approach to Zero Trust

In the context of zero trust, a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) tool is often considered the most relevant, fundamental solution because it directly replaces the traditional "trusted network" model—often delivered through a VPN—with encrypted micro-tunnels and identity-based authentication. In that way, Fortra ZTNA improves upon a typical VPN's capabilities by delivering granular access controls, continuous user and device verification, and comprehensive session monitoring.

These capabilities ensure users only receive access to the specific applications, resources, and data required for their roles and responsibilities. By monitoring user behavior and device posture throughout sessions, our tool enables dynamic access adjustments based on risk factors and maintains zero trust at the network access layer.

With ZTNA's sheer relevance to zero trust in mind, Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) represents the cornerstone of Fortra's entire defensive security portfolio and an intelligence hub that drives security policy effectiveness, making it just as, if not far more important within an organization's greater zero trust architecture. Fortra DSPM maps your organization's entire data landscape across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, identifies and classifies sensitive data, and delivers visibility into who has access to what data and how they use it. This critical intelligence ensures data security controls remain effective and properly configured to enable constant, data-aware authentication.

With a fully mapped data landscape, including data containers and the sensitive data itself, a vulnerability management (VM) solution then has the information it needs to provide comprehensive vulnerability discovery, risk prioritization, and remediation tracking across endpoints, servers, applications, and security controls.

In this way, rather than inherently trusting network assets within the bounds of a protected perimeter, Fortra VM continuously assesses and prioritizes each component of your system for exploitable vulnerabilities and prioritizes their remediation based on the business impact of a potential breach. This makes secure network segmentation and the associated benefits more realistic and manageable at scale.

Fortra Data Loss Prevention (DLP) provides comprehensive endpoint and network data protection through advanced content inspection, user behavior analytics, and policy enforcement. Our DLP solution offers real-time monitoring of data in use, in motion, and at rest, with granular controls for structured and unstructured data across all digital environments.

Fortra DLP serves as the critical enforcement layer within an organization's greater zero trust architecture that validates data access requests, monitors data usage patterns, and proactively prevents unauthorized data exfiltration. The solution's continuous monitoring capabilities align with Zero Trust principles by providing real-time verification of data access legitimacy and implementing adaptive controls based on user behavior and data sensitivity.

While DSPM and Fortra DLP both have classification abilities of their own, a dedicated solution like Fortra Data Classification delivers more flexible, granular classification with configurable schema values for facilitated compliance and metadata fields for unique business requirements, both of which provide deep visibility and the needed context to drive downstream security solutions.

By applying visual markings and metadata tags that persist with data throughout its lifecycle, our solution provides the foundational intelligence required for implementing least-privilege access controls and risk-based protection policies. By understanding data sensitivity and context, organizations can make informed decisions and apply appropriate security controls dynamically, ensuring their highest-value data receives enhanced protection—all while maintaining operational efficiency.

Fortra Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) provides comprehensive cloud application security through real-time traffic analysis, policy enforcement, and threat protection across sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud services. In the context of zero trust, Fortra CASB extends verification and control capabilities from your endpoints to private and cloud applications—ensuring application access follows the same rigorous authentication and authorization processes as on-premises resources—and then employs fine-tuned user privileges and sharing rights to prevent data loss. 

Our solution acts as a security guard for your cloud and private applications, ensuring they can't be accessed from risky locations or devices, the correct users can access them, and that the use of shadow IT is constantly monitored. No user, device, or workflow is inherently trusted.

While ZTNA and CASB address identity and access management, and VM accounts for any exploitable vulnerabilities, Fortra Integrity and Compliance Monitoring (ICM) provides real-time file integrity monitoring (FIM), security configuration management (SCM), and facilitated compliance reporting across critical systems and applications.

Our solution detects suspicious or unauthorized changes to your operating systems, servers, endpoints, network devices, and other critical assets, while also evaluating and correcting configuration settings across your systems. Concerning zero trust, this tool constantly validates your network configurations and further aids successful network segmentation.

Last but far from least comes the often-overlooked human element of zero trust. Fortra Human Risk Management (HRM) identifies risky user behaviors, reinforces positive behaviors, and uses the collected data to reduce real-world human risks and break the social engineering attack chain.