Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) software is a security architecture that dynamically creates one-to-one network connections between users and resources, based on strict authentication and authorization policies. This approach reduces the attack surface by hiding infrastructure from unauthorized users and devices.
SDP software is crucial for network security as it ensures that only authenticated and authorized users can access specific resources, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and potential breaches.
SDP software solutions are helping network security and cybersecurity professionals by providing granular control over network access, even in complex environments like cloud-based or hybrid infrastructures. They provide on-demand access to services, networks, and applications upon verification – through adaptive, granular network segmentation functionality.
Additionally, SDP software enhances security by continuously monitoring activity and verifying network access requests, while using encryption and authentication protocols, thus making it difficult for attackers to intercept or tamper with data.
Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) products are a type of network security solution that focus on dividing networks into smaller, secure segments and verifying users before allowing access. Unlike traditional network security, which uses a basic lock and key approach, SDP analyzes access requests at a detailed level, ensuring that each user can only access what they need.
Businesses use SDP because traditional network security is often too broad, allowing hackers access to more than they should have. SDP, however, checks every access request against user permissions, granting access only when it’s appropriate. This constant verification also helps track user activity and behavior.
Overall, SDP software improves network security posture by adopting a Zero Trust approach, where all network traffic is untrusted until proven otherwise, mitigating risks associated with traditional perimeter-based security models.
Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) software has evolved significantly since its inception. In the past, traditional network security relied heavily on perimeter defenses, such as firewalls, to protect networks from external threats. However, as cyber attacks became more sophisticated, these defenses proved inadequate, leading to the development of SDP solutions.
Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) Software vs. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
SDP is different from Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) because VPNs create a barrier to entry that can be breached. SDP, on the other hand, uses continuous authentication to monitor and control access. While SDP and zero-trust security share some concepts, SDP focuses on building secure network structures that support zero-trust principles, making both approaches more effective.
Initially, SDP software focused on creating secure, isolated network segments to protect critical assets from unauthorized access. These early solutions were often complex to deploy and manage, limiting their adoption. Over time, SDP software has evolved to become more user-friendly and scalable, making it easier for organizations to implement.
Today, SDP software has become an essential component of modern cybersecurity strategies, offering granular control over network access and reducing the attack surface. These solutions leverage technologies such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and continuous monitoring to enhance security.
Additionally, SDP software has evolved to support cloud-based and hybrid environments, providing organizations with flexibility and agility in their security posture.
Best Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) Software: What To Look For
When choosing the best Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) software for your organization, there are several key factors, features, and capabilities to consider:
- Adaptive, Granular Network Segmentation: Look for SDP software that offers the ability to segment the network into smaller, secure zones based on user roles, device types, and other contextual factors. This allows for more precise control over network access.
- Identity-Centric Security: Ensure that the SDP software focuses on verifying user identities before granting access. This helps prevent unauthorized access and reduces the risk of insider threats.
- Continuous Authentication: Choose SDP software that provides continuous authentication, monitoring user behavior and adjusting access permissions in real-time based on risk factors.
- On-Demand Access: The SDP software should provide on-demand access to services, networks, and applications based on verified user identities and permissions.
- Encryption: Look for SDP software that uses strong encryption protocols to protect data in transit and at rest, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure.
- Ease of Use: The SDP software should be user-friendly and easy to deploy and manage, with intuitive interfaces for administrators and end-users.
- Scalability: Ensure that the SDP software can scale to meet the needs of your organization, supporting a growing number of users, devices, and applications.
- Compatibility: Choose SDP software that is compatible with your existing network infrastructure, ensuring seamless integration and minimal disruption.
- Compliance: Ensure that the SDP software meets relevant regulatory and compliance requirements for your industry, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI DSS.
- Monitoring and Reporting: Look for SDP software that provides comprehensive monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing you to track access requests, detect anomalies, and generate compliance reports.
By considering these factors, features, and capabilities, organizations can choose the best SDP software to enhance their network security and protect their critical assets.
Best Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) Software Used By Security Professionals
1. Symantec/Broadcom Secure Access Cloud
Leveraging Software Defined Perimeter technology, Symantec ZTNA delivers protection for the Cloud Generation. It cloaks all corporate resources on the network, fully isolating datacenters from the end-users and the internet. The network-level attack surface is entirely removed, leaving no room for lateral movement and network-based threats, unlike the broad network access legacy solutions such as VPNs and NGFWs allow. Zero Trust Network Access is a SaaS solution that enables more secure and granular access management to any corporate resource hosted on-premises or in the cloud. It uses Zero Trust Access principles in delivering point-to-point connectivity, without agents or appliances, eliminating network level threats.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Delivers the must-have component of SASE for security access to applications, as outlined by industry analysts.
- Eliminates network surface attacks by cloaking the applications from unauthorized users and preventing lateral movement of authorized users beyond their approved application.
- Integrates with any existing identity provider, ZTNA continuously reauthorizes the user’s access and activity in real-time within a context-based least privilege approach, validating each and every request across a wide set of security parameters.
- Provides full data governance and monitoring control to enforce allowed activity policies and in-line data inspection for compliance and malware threat protection.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Symantec/Broadcom Secure Access Cloud
2. Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) is a cloud native security service edge (SSE) solution that builds on a decade of secure web gateway leadership. Offered as a scalable SaaS platform through the world’s largest security cloud, it replaces legacy network security solutions, preventing advanced attacks and data loss with a comprehensive zero trust approach. ZIA is integrated seamlessly into the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ to provide superior defense-in-depth, secure connectivity, end user experience, and administrative visibility and control.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Cyberthreat and ransomware protection: Minimize the attack surface, stop compromise, eliminate lateral movement, and prevent data loss with the world’s most comprehensive cyberthreat protection solution.
- Lower cost and complexity: Eliminate costly, complex networks with fast, secure, direct-to-cloud access that removes the need for edge and branch firewalls.
- Data protection: Avoid the cost and disruption of data loss from users, SaaS apps, and public cloud infrastructure due to accidental exposure, theft, or double extortion ransomware.
- A secure hybrid workforce: Empower employees, partners, customers, and suppliers to securely access web applications and cloud services from anywhere, on any device—and ensure a great digital experience.
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Zscaler Internet Access
3. Appgate SDP
Design your ideal Zero Trust architecture. Control how data traverses your network. Secure your whole environment. Build a cohesive security ecosystem. Get the flexibility, extensibility and integration advantages of Appgate SDP direct-routed Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Cloak all resources rendering your attack surface invisible
- Stop unsanctioned lateral movement with risk-informed least privilege access
- Maintain full control of how your data and traffic is routed
- Transform your network with secure café-style connectivity
IDEAL FOR:
- Enterprise
- Mid-market
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Appgate SDP
4. Absolute Secure Access
What sets Absolute Secure Access apart is its purpose-built technology that is designed to meet the complex needs of highly mobile, distributed workforces. It delivers innovative capabilities needed to ensure employee productivity and provides an exceptional experience for both users and IT administrators. Ultimately, Absolute makes counting on a networked world possible.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Make your remote access solution resilient to external factors, leveraging a self-healing Secure Access client for Windows.
- Quickly and easily expand access to networks, the Internet, cloud services, and private applications without interfering with your employees’ ability to do their jobs.
- Make applications invisible to unauthorized users, which reduces the attack surface.
- Conduct real-time risk assessments as well as threat detection and prevention.
- Assure a secure browsing experience for all – desk, mobile, or hybrid users.
- Improve help desk effectiveness by proactively diagnosing and correcting poorly performing networks.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Absolute Secure Access
5. GoodAccess SDP
Make your infrastructure invisible to the prying eyes of attackers and other non-authorized personnel, whether it resides in your LAN, datacenter, or cloud. With GoodAccess software-defined perimeter you can define your network with identity-based network access and face modern online threats with confidence.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Zero-trust access control: Assign access rights based on the least-privilege principle to prevent unauthorized access and lateral movement. With virtual access cards, every user receives a private network identity, which, after authentication, allows them to access only specified applications that they are authorized to use. You can also use external providers’ single sign-on authentication (GSuite, Okta, Active Directory/LDAP).
- Secure: Cover every device as a potential entry point to your network and protect it by zero-trust access control, MFA, SSO, traffic encryption, segmentation, and other features.
- Easy to manage: Manage on-premise and cloud assets, users and devices, assign access rights, and set up granular access policies via a web GUI.
- Cloud delivered: Deploy GoodAccess in 10 minutes even if you are not a networking expert. Benefit from a 100% software solution that scales as you grow.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Small business
PRODUCT WEBSITE: GoodAccess SDP
6. FortiGate SD-WAN
FortiGate delivers fast, scalable, and flexible Secure SD-WAN on-premises and in the cloud. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN supports cloud-first, security-sensitive, and global enterprises, as well as the hybrid workforce. Our Secure Networking approach uses one operating system and consolidates SD-WAN, next-generation firewall (NGFW), advanced routing, and ZTNA application gateway functions.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Application resilience: Ensures the highest level of application availability and performance over any WAN transport.
- Integrated advanced security: Converges the most advanced NGFW and routing to deliver consistent security on- and off-network.
- Scalable, high performance: Transforms and secures SD-WAN at scale with no performance impact thanks to our WAN ASIC.
- Zero-Touch provisioning: Enables large scale, faster deployment of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
PRODUCT WEBSITE: FortiGate SD-WAN
7. Instasafe ZTAA
With Zero Trust Application Security by InstaSafe, you can Secure Single Click Unified Access to SSH/RDP Servers and Applications hosted anywhere, by workforces located anywhere.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Blacken your IT Infrastructure
- Provide “Need to Know” Secure Zero Trust Application Access Security
- Allow only Authorized / Trusted Devices
- Granular Visibility of User Activity
- Scale As You Grow with our Zero Trust Application Model
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Instasafe ZTAA
8. Check Point SDP
Boost remote access security with granular zero trust policies and network segmentation.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Device posture check: Ensure that devices are meeting company security requirements before connecting to the network, with continuous verification ensuring the device posture does not change.
- Unified cloud dashboard: Manage your network from a single, intuitive dashboard. Easily onboard and offboard users, add or remove permissions, or even add multiple networks for greater security.
- Per-application access control: Users need to connect to applications, not the entire network. Zero Trust Access rules ensure that employees get what they need to do their job. No more, no less.
- Device inventory management: Get an understanding of the managed devices connecting to your network and their current state of health.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Check Point SDP
9. Aruba ESP
Connect and secure your edges with a single unified platform. HPE Aruba Networking Edge Services Platform (ESP) is a network architecture that unifies infrastructure, security, policies, and AI-powered management across all your edges.
STATS & SPECIFICATIONS:
- Unified: Gain context, visibility, and control over all domains through a cloud-native, uniform console for Wi-Fi, wired, and WAN infrastructure. Our Unified Infrastructure simplifies and improves IT operations across campus, branch, remote, data center, and IoT networks – all managed and orchestrated in the cloud or on-prem for ease and efficiency.
- AI-powered IT: Automatically see, fix and keep Wi-Fi, wired, SD-WAN and application issues at a minimum for an optimized user experience. Trusted insights from over 1.5B data points reduce mean time to resolution by up to 95%, while delivering performance boosts by up to 40% or more.
- Secure: Increase protection without adding complexity: Our edge-to-cloud security provides a built-in foundation for Zero Trust and SASE frameworks, while securing direct Internet breakouts and multi-cloud connectivity from the WAN edge. Gain comprehensive visibility, control, and enforcement capabilities to address the requirements of a decentralized network.
- Agile: Gain cloud-like agility and flexibility by consuming as-a-service. HPE GreenLake for Networking is a comprehensive network-as-a-service (NaaS) offering that delivers your HPE Aruba Networking products and services in a monthly subscription, with options for flexible consumption. Leveraging the vast financial resources of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and geographic reach of our channel partner network, your HPE GreenLake for Networking solution will be delivered where and how you need it.
IDEAL FOR:
- Mid-market
- Enterprise
PRODUCT WEBSITE: Aruba ESP
In Conclusion…
Using the right Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP) software is crucial for organizations seeking to enhance their network security and protect against evolving cyber threats. The best SDP solutions offer adaptive, granular network segmentation, identity-centric security, and continuous authentication to ensure that only authorized users and devices have access to sensitive resources.
Additionally, these solutions should provide on-demand access, strong encryption, and scalability to meet the needs of modern IT environments. Ease of use, compatibility with existing infrastructure, and compliance with regulatory requirements are also key considerations when evaluating SDP software.
By carefully considering these factors and features, organizations can choose an SDP solution that strengthens their security posture and reduces the risk of data breaches.