Sophos ZTNA – Answering Your Top Questions

ProductsProduct NewsSophos ZTNA

We have taken the time to articulate why Sophos ZTNA is so important.

Sophos ZTNA is the right product at the right time – offering organizations a secure, simple, and scalable solution for connecting remote workers and replacing their old remote-access VPN.

Last week we we ran a SophSkills webcast session to answer all your top questions about Sophos ZTNA. You can watch the video on-demand here, or read through the top questions and answers below.

What does Sophos ZTNA do?
Sophos ZTNA is a better way of doing remote access VPN. It’s the optimal way to securely connect remote users to applications, data, and systems which they need to perform their jobs. It also provides better security, a smoother user experience, streamlined management, and easier scalability.

How does Sophos ZTNA work?
Unlike VPN, which grants broad access to the entire network, Sophos ZTNA only connects a user to a specific application or system which they are accessing. It establishes a secure connection only when their ID is verified and the health of their device is validated. This is more secure because if a threat invades the end-users laptop, it has nowhere to go.

Where should I sell Sophos ZTNA?
Make Sophos ZTNA part of every endpoint or firewall discussion. Ask the prospect if they have remote workers, and if they do, you have the perfect opportunity to include Sophos ZTNA in the opportunity – as it can solve all their pains with VPN and improve their protection. Sophos ZTNA also offers a single agent, console and vendor solution.

What are some common pains with VPN I might hear?
VPN has a lot of issues, including:

  • It’s difficult for end-users, unreliable, slow, and often frustrating
  • It’s challenging to setup and manage, including adding or removing users. It has become a full-time job for many
  • VPN is more vulnerable to attacks like Ransomware and the broad access it provides is an unnecessary and dangerous risk

What makes Sophos ZTNA Unique?
Sophos ZTNA provides a true zero trust endpoint solution. While it works with any endpoint product, we’ve integrated it with Sophos Intercept X to make them work better together and solve the industry’s top complaint about early ZTNA solutions – the need for multiple agents for both endpoint and ZTNA. Our solution supports Synchronized Security, with extremely simple licensing and competitive pricing.

Customers get better end-to-end protection for their users, endpoints, connections, applications, and networks all while making things much simpler.

Who to target and who to avoid?
Target any prospect who has remote workers (using VPN) with these characteristics:

  • has applications hosted in AWS or on-premise that remote workers access
  • Windows clients
  • VMware or AWS for gateway platforms
  • Azure AD or Okta authentication

Avoid, for now (until we support these platforms):

  • Environments that require Hyper-V, Azure, GCP, or other gateway platforms
  • Mac or mobile clients
  • Organizations with on-premise AD unwilling to sync to Azure
  • Co-existence with competing ZTNA products

Who am I competing against?
The Sophos ZTNA market remains largely untapped, as very few organizations have already adopted ZTNA and are still using old-school VPN. The vendor landscape is also still emerging with lots of players. Zscaler is popular in large enterprise. Most firewall vendors have ZTNA solutions. However, there is no clear winning ZTNA solution at this time as every solution has strengths and weaknesses, but no vendor has an integrated industry-leading next-gen endpoint and ZTNA product like Sophos does. None of our next-gen endpoint competitors has an integrated ZTNA solution.

Check out this new competitive summary for more insight into several ZTNA vendors.

How are we priced?
Our pricing is middle of the pack. We are neither the lowest-cost or most premium priced product. We instead offer very competitive pricing with very simple licensing. No charge for gateways, no tiers, no hidden or extra costs – just simple per-user subscription pricing.

If you have any more questions, visit the Selling Sophos ZTNA page on the Sophos Partner Portal or reach out directly to your Sophos representative.