RESEARCH from One Identity, a unified identity security provider, succinctly sums up the state of zero-trust adoption: a work in progress. Conducted by Dimensional Research, the survey of 1,009 IT security professionals finds that 99% of respondents say zero trust is important to their organization’s security posture, with 75% characterizing it as “critically” or “very important,” yet just 14% have implemented a zero-trust strategy and only 1 in 5 security stakeholders (21%) are “very confident” their organization understands zero trust.
Still, adoption is underway at 39% of respondents’ organizations, and 22% plan to implement zero trust over the course of the next year. Notably, a mere 2% of respondents say they don’t know what zero trust is, and just 8% have no plans to implement it.
Source: One Identity
The study asked respondents how their organizations could best begin the move to zero trust (respondents could choose three answers). The range of responses includes continuously verifying who has access to what, and when (49%), followed by better monitoring of users’ access and privilege (48%), implementing new access management technologies (41%), and mapping traffic of sensitive data associated with business applications (35%).
Organizations that plan to implement a zero-trust model are taking multiple approaches, such as reconfiguring access policies (61%), identifying how sensitive data moves throughout the network (54%), implementing new technology (51%), and rearchitecting the network (39%). (Respondents could choose all that applied.)
A vast majority of respondents (94%) cite a variety of barriers to adopting zero trust, however. At the top of the list is lack of clarity on how adoption can be achieved and the requirement for ongoing identity and access management (both at 32%), followed by the perceived impact on employee productivity, other priorities taking up their time, and lack of resources and budget.
Clearly, though, the march toward zero trust is on, and channel pros have an opportunity to help their SMB customers with that journey.
Image: iStock
