As organizations look for new ways to deal with the growing threat of cyberattacks, Zero Trust is increasingly becoming mainstream among IT and cybersecurity professionals, according to a new report from Microsoft.
The IT giant has released its Zero Trust Adoption Report 2021 in which more than 1,200 security decision-makers were surveyed about their Zero Trust adoption progress, and the findings suggest that more and more organizations are looking to this concept to help secure their environment.
Among cybersecurity professionals, the concept is gaining popularity, writes Microsoft Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president of security, compliance and identity, in a blog post.
In the face of this rapid change, Zero Trust has risen as a guiding cybersecurity strategy for organizations around the globe. A Zero Trust security model assumes breach and explicitly verifies the security status of identity, endpoint, network, and other resources based on all available signals and data. It relies on contextual real-time policy enforcement to achieve least privileged access and minimize risks. Automation and machine learning are used to enable rapid detection, prevention, and remediation of attacks using behavior analytics and large datasets.
Early adopters are seeing the benefits—organizations operating with a Zero Trust mindset across their environments are more resilient, responsive, and protected than those with traditional perimeter-based security models.
Read Next: The 5 Misconceptions You Probably Have About a Zero Trust Approach
According to the Microsoft Zero Trust report, familiarity and adoption of Zero Trust is growing rapidly, with 90% of respondents saying they are familiar with the concept and 76% in the process of implementing it, increases of 20% and 6%, respectively.
The report found that Zero Trust is now the top security priority with 96% of respondents saying the model is critical to their organization’s success, citing increased security and compliance agility, speed of threat detection and remediation and simplicity and availability of security analytics.
Hybrid work is a major reason why organizations are adopting Zero Trust, the report found, as 81% of organizations have begun moving to a hybrid workplace.
Respondents also indicated that Zero Trust will remain a top security budget priority, with a majority saying they expect the importance of Zero Trust to increase over the next two years, and 73% expect their Zero Trust budget to rise.
The last year and a half has been an onslaught of cyberthreats from nation state actors to large ransomware campaigns, and that has probably attracted the attention of executives and decisionmakers at your company.
With cybersecurity awareness increasing, now is a great opportunity to bring your security concerns to your executive team and advocate for implementing a Zero Trust model at your organization.
If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!
Leave a Reply