We have noticed some chatter about our latest release of Zenarmor 1.17 across various social channels. While it has been received well by the large majority of our customers, we have noted some concerns or confusion about our newly added Security Service Edge (SSE) subscription as well as the Full TLS Inspection capabilities made available in this release. We would like to take the opportunity to provide some clarity about this and our future roadmap.
Firstly, our Free, Home, SOHO, and Business subscription plans remain as is for the foreseeable future, you will continue to receive regular updates, improvements, and the great security capabilities you have come to know and love from Zenarmor, so rest assured, you are covered.
As for our newly added SSE subscription, it has been part of the Zenarmor roadmap for some time already, where we have strived to bring even more advanced security functionality to our product, like Full TLS Inspection and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) capabilities, and as of this release, we have achieved this and is the starting point as we venture more so into the business and enterprise world where Security Service Edge (SSE) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solutions are desired to tackle the security challenges faced by companies with a hyper distributed, remote workforce.
Some have noticed that we have not listed the pricing for our SSE plan, whereas our other plans have pricing listed, the main reason for this is that we would like the opportunity to create a tailormade, personalized solution and experience for our customers, and is a common practice across most providers in the SSE/SASE space. Rest assured, it's not because pricing is astronomical or complex, in fact, we remain highly competitive in the SSE/SASE marketplace.
Regarding Full TLS Inspection, we acknowledge that this capability has both strong proponents and opponents, and there are definitely pros and cons to using it. The fact of the matter is that Full TLS Inspection is required in order to deliver more advanced security and reporting features like CASB, DLP, Sandboxing, etc which are all common capabilities in all fully-featured SSE/SASE solutions. Furthermore, some industries and educational institutions require Full TLS Inspection to meet compliance requirements.
With Zenarmor we have made TLS Inspection simple to implement and you have the following options:
- Simply keep it disabled and continue using our current SNI-Based TLS Inspection which does not decrypt the payload, you can still benefit from web and application control and reporting capabilities as enjoyed with your current Zenarmor deployment to date.
- Enable Full TLS Inspection partially by selecting the categories of traffic or custom web content you wish to inspect while disabling inspection on sensitive traffic like banking or medical-related services.
- Enable Full TLS Inspection on all categories or for particular device groups or networks/VLANS, with granular controls for exclusions of apps or web content that may have certificate pinning-related issues.
To cater to everyone's unique needs or stance about TLS Inspection, Zenarmor’s TLS Inspection has been designed to be flexible giving you the option and control over its use on your network. With a proper implementation strategy in place, Full TLS Inspection can help improve your overall security posture by identifying what bad actors are hiding in encrypted packets.
Some closing and final thoughts, Zenarmor as you know it is not going anywhere, we are just getting better. If you are a home user or a business that does not need full TLS Inspection, simply don't use it, we have plenty of current and future features on our roadmap that you can still enjoy. If you are shopping around for an SSE/SASE solution, give us a try, you will be pleasantly surprised as to what is on offer and is included in our roadmap.
Finally, if you are an IT or Security pro by day and, “homelaber” by night we have created the Zenarmor Tinkerer Club where you can be one of the first to experience the latest Zenarmor has to offer. If you would like to contribute and help shape Zenarmor this club is for you, feel free to sign up today.
