Abstract: In a cloud-based data plane for a zero trust network access system, a service proxy manages incoming user requests for access to ZTNA applications. A load balancer may be configured to retrieve connection information from the data plane such as connection counts, tunnel distributions, and so forth, and to use this information to provide load balancing information to the service proxy, so that the service proxy can specify a route to the customer premises through the data plane. Secure tunnels to a customer premises can also be scaled according to traffic using tunnel information available within the data plane. In one aspect, tunnels can be scaled up by checking for connections and only adding a new tunnel when existing tunnels are full. In another aspect, tunnels can be scaled down by removing existing connections as they are taken down by users, and timing out connections that exceed a timeout window.