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Welcome to the holiday season, the busiest travel time of the year. As the classic carol goes, there really is no place like home for the holidays. This means many of us are making our way through airports now to spend time with family and friends.

For those of us who haven’t traveled in a while, we’ll also be brushing up on the latest airport security requirements. Let’s face it, no one wants to be the person who has to throw away that expensive new hand lotion we bought because it exceeds the Travel Security Administration (TSA)’s 3.4 oz carry-on liquids rule.

The average traveler may wonder, what’s the difference between a 3.2 oz bottle of lotion in a quart-sized bag compared to just taking the 5.2 oz tube you already have in your backpack? Honestly, we aren’t going to be able to answer that question in this blog. But we do know airport and airline security experts have developed these protocols and procedures for a good reason: safety.

Information technology (IT) security policies and procedures can sometimes seem as arbitrary to the average employee as the TSA’s liquids rule. While your IT team says the purpose of IT security policies is to keep company data and applications secure, it can seem like these rules exist to keep you from easily accessing necessary resources to work efficiently.

This is where zero trust network access (ZTNA) 2.0 comes in. ZTNA 2.0 can help both IT security teams and employees work efficiently and securely, eliminating the frustrations that come from seemingly random rules that are meant to keep us safe but, in practice, just seem to make us late for flights (or unable to get our projects done on time).

ZTNA 2.0 is comprised of five key principles, and it works within an IT infrastructure like the various security points air travelers encounter during air travel.

The 5 principles of ZTNA 2.0 explained as airline travel

Here’s what each of the five principles of ZTNA 2.0 look like if we consider each principle as a part of the airline travel experience.

1. Least privilege access. Within an organization, least privilege access enables precise access control at the application and sub-application levels, independent of network constructs such as IP addresses and port numbers. In terms of air travel, this is similar to the boarding pass that gives you access to a specific seat on a specific plane.
2. Continuous trust verification. After users access an application, trust verification continues based on changes in device posture, user behavior, and application behavior. In terms of air travel, this is similar to when an unruly flight passenger is escorted off a plane; their behavior didn’t pass the airline’s trust assessment.
3. Continuous security inspection. Airline passengers and their belongings go through baggage and body scanners before getting to the gates and on a plane. Similarly, ZTNA 2.0 uses deep, continuous inspection of all application traffic, including for allowed connections, to help prevent threats, including zero-day threats.
4. Protection of all data and 5. security for all applications. Like an airline tracking your luggage, ZTNA 2.0 provides consistent data control across all enterprise applications, including modern cloud-native applications, private legacy applications, and SaaS applications, with a single data loss prevention (DLP) policy.

Reduce stress levels with ZTNA 2.0

Just like holiday airline travel, it can be stressful to protect and secure employees, apps, and data across your company or organization. The ZTNA 2.0 principles and architectural requirements provide IT security teams a framework and the technology so every employee can access the data and applications they need on any device they choose, wherever they work — all while still meeting strict security requirements.

Interested in learning more about ZTNA 2.0? We have multiple resources collected here that explain how ZTNA 2.0 can help you secure the future of work.