What is the outcome of reducing the attack surface using ZPA?

Reducing the attack surface using Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) is fundamentally about minimizing the areas that are vulnerable to attacks, which directly contributes to the prevention of lateral movement across the network. By implementing ZPA, organizations create secure, application-specific access controls, ensuring that users only have access to the applications they need and limiting unnecessary exposure to the network. This strategy makes it more challenging for malicious actors to move within the environment after gaining initial access, thereby bolstering overall security.

The focus of ZPA on minimizing the attack surface aligns with modern security practices that advocate for least privilege access and micro-segmentation. This helps in containing potential breaches to the specific application the user accesses, thereby limiting the scope of any lateral movement, which is a common tactic used by attackers to navigate through a compromised network.

While enhancing user experience and reducing administrative overhead can be side effects of implementing ZPA, they do not directly correlate with the primary objective of attack surface reduction. Similarly, while ZPA significantly improves security posture, it cannot guarantee the complete elimination of all network threats, as no cybersecurity measure can provide absolute certainty against all potential threats.