One of the biggest trends to have taken the industry by storm over recent months is the Zero Trust model, and it has shaped how organizations consider the way that they should approach cybersecurity.

The clear-cut nature of network perimeters within a secure boundary between the private and locally managed networks and the public-facing, centralized IT, and people working in brick and mortar offices may be a thing of the past. The security that existed a decade ago, which was built on trust and verifiability is no longer sufficient and, in some cases, dangerous, the setup is often unnecessarily complex, and vulnerabilities can be easily exploited. Businesses run on a digital landscape in which partners, employees, and customers can connect from any location, remotely are growing rapidly.

Today, at KUBECON 2019, being held in San Diego, California; NetFoundry Inc., the leader in cloud-native, Zero Trust networking, enabling applications to get Zero Trust security and high performance over the Internet, has announced an industry-first developer platform that enables programmable, zero-trust networking, stating that “Apps are the new Edge”.

The NetFoundry Developer Platform enables private, secure, and high-performance networking to be embedded easily into applications. The Developer Platform extends SDKs, APIs, and Zero Trust connectors to authorize modern applications to inlay Zero Trust security and optimize performance, regardless of where the applications are located, which include mobile, edge, the Internet of Things (IoT), and service meshes.

The Developer Platform is now generally available and includes open source options. The general announcement has been made after running a beta program that included customer pilots and integrations with Microsoft (News - Alert) Kaizala, Micron Authenta™, Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, Codefresh.io, CloudBees, NetApp, Intel, NodeWeaver, LokBlok, OpenEMR, IMS Evolve, Dell, and leading blockchain, security, cloud, and IoT solutions. 

“The NetFoundry Developer platform with connectivity-as-code and SDK allows seamless integration with Microsoft Kaizala line of business applications to securely connect with cloud and backend data center applications.” Said, Anand R, Director at Microsoft.

The Developer Platform integrates with applications leveraging the NetFoundry Fabric, the heart of the NetFoundry platform. The world’s largest dynamic, Zero Trust, performance-optimizing Internet overlay provides “day zero security and performance” that eradicates dependencies on after-the-fact security and performance engineering and enables new possibilities in application development, while open source options add to existing network-as-a-service (NaaS) services that in turn provide additional flexibility for cloud-native application developers and DevOps teams.

Applications can take advantage of the NetFoundry Fabric from any Internet access enabling them the benefit of Zero Trust security and enhanced performance wherever they go without having to rely on dedicated networks. Dynamic private overlays that enable private to private connectivity over the Internet can be “spun up” without the need for VPNs and NATs. Independent software vendors (ISVs) and cloud-native businesses can supplant complex, performance-hindering VPN connections between their application backends and their business customers. 

“Traditionally, developers didn’t control networking because the proper abstractions didn’t exist. That puts apps at the mercy of legacy networking constructs such as VPNs – constructs that are being broken by edge, cloud and service mesh applications. Networking has become a barrier to app innovation and automation. Our Developer Platform enables developers, network engineers, DevOps, and cloud teams to break through this barrier by programmatically controlling private, secure, high-performance networking.” Stated Galeal Zino, CEO of NetFoundry Inc.

“NetFoundry enables Zero Trust, secure and reliable communication between our customers and our software services, no matter where the client or the host are connected. It has allowed us to further secure our front end and back end service without putting a giant burden on our network support team,” declared Todd Doane, Solution Architect at OmniSYS, a leading pharmaceutical ISV.