Today, cybersecurity companies are in a never-ending race against cyber criminals, each seeking innovative new tactics to outpace the other. The newfound accessibility of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) has revolutionized how people work, but it's also made threat actors more efficient. Attackers can now quickly create phishing messages or automate vulnerability discoveries.

With the rise of hybrid work, data leakage has become a significant issue. Employees are now working from a variety of locations, including their homes, coffee shops, and even public libraries. This makes it more difficult to keep track of data moving between managed endpoints and your organization's SaaS applications or private apps. Shadow IT, the use of unauthorized or unapproved software and services by employees has always been a challenge for IT departments.

For more than two decades, virtual private networks (VPNs) have been the go-to technology for enterprise remote access — and by extension, for enforcing remote access security. Even ubiquitous internet connections are often redirected via VPN to a central data center, where security enforcement occurs through various hardware appliances. From there, the traffic is forwarded onward to the internet. Of course, it must follow the same indirect path back on the response side.