98% of UK firms planning to implement zero trust strategies
New research finds 98 per cent of organisations plan to implement zero trust architecture. Despite the interest, a top barrier to implementing Zero Trust strategies is, surprisingly, concern over employees feeling trusted by their employer.
The report by Illumino Inc also revealed the challenges organisations face when implementing zero trust architecture. Respondents cited employee perception and resistance to change as the primary barriers to activating their zero trust plans. Notably, nearly a third (32%) of respondents expressed concern about employees thinking the company doesn’t trust them.
Raghu Nandakumara, EMEA Field CTO, Illumio said: “This research makes one thing clear – UK business leaders and IT professionals know how important zero trust strategies are in making their organisations resilient, particularly as ransomware wreaks havoc across every industry. It’s especially encouraging to see over 90 percent of organisations prioritising segmentation, since this is an essential control in keeping critical assets safe from attacks. Despite some technological and organisational barriers, we all need to start or continue, making incremental progress on our zero trust plans. It’s better to be slightly more secure tomorrow than to have the perfect plan on paper in two years.”
For organisations that have already adopted a zero trust approach, the top two reasons cited for implementation were either because it was a part of a strategy refresh on security infrastructure (48%), or to enable the business to improve its agility through digital transformation (47%). Furthermore, 60% stated the greatest benefit from their zero trust approach was feeling more confident they had secured their critical data and reduced their organisation’s risk exposure (54%).
Zero trust is a strategy and philosophy, and no one technology can make an organisation achieve zero trust overnight. An essential pillar to any zero trust strategy is segmentation, and the vast majority of organisations (92%) are segmenting their networks in some way. While a lot of respondents are using legacy approaches like virtual firewalls (52%) and network-based segmentation (49%), many said that they’re also taking a more modern, scalable approach and segmenting by application characteristics (32%), or implementing workload based micro-segmentation (32%).
The survey was conducted among 203 UK Senior IT security decision-makers, from companies with more than 250 employees. At an overall level, results are accurate to ± 6.9% at 95% confidence limits assuming a result of 50%. The interviews were conducted online by Sapio Research in June 2021.
Illumio, is a market leader in zero trust Segmentation, stopping breaches from becoming cyber disasters. Illumio Core™ and Illumio Edge™ automate policy enforcement to stop cyberattacks and ransomware from spreading across applications, containers, clouds, data centres, and endpoints. By combining intelligent visibility to detect threats with security enforcement achieved in minutes, Illumio enables the world’s leading organisations to strengthen their cyber resiliency and reduce risk.
