Zero trust may be seen as a great method of securing a company perimeter from both internal and external threats, but to make it a reality, everyone needs to be on board.
However, a new report from zero trust segmentation firm Illumio suggests employees are pushing back on the initiative, due to an unwillingness to change and concerns about their bosses not trusting them.
Polling roughly 200 Senior IT security decision-makers in the UK for the report, Illumio found that nearly all (98 percent) have either already implementing zero trust principles, or are planning to do so.
There are two main reasons business leaders are opting for zero trust: because it forms part of a strategy to refresh security infrastructure (48 percent), or because the business is aiming to improve agility through digital transformation (47 percent).
Most respondents said they were feeling more confident about the security of their critical data with zero trust. But they fear employees don’t share the same excitement.
Almost a third (32 percent) of respondents said they were worried their employees thought the company didn’t trust them. There are technological barriers as well; in 29 percent of cases, legacy systems that couldn’t be upgraded got in the way.
“This research makes one thing clear – UK business leaders and IT professionals know how important zero trust strategies are in making their organizations resilient, particularly as ransomware wreaks havoc across every industry,” said Raghu Nandakumara, EMEA Field CTO, Illumio.
“It’s especially encouraging to see over 90 percent of organizations prioritizing segmentation since this is an essential control in keeping critical assets safe from attacks. Despite some technological and organizational 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.”
