A survey of 185 US companies, including multinational operations, global telecommunications market research and consulting firm, TeleGeography, revealed that 35% of WAN managers implemented one or more elements of zero-trust security (ZTS) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) on at least some of their company’s networks in 2021.
The survey also reveals that close to 100% of respondents from 185 companies who had adopted ZTS had multi-factor authentication in place.
Single sign-on, remote user and device access policies, and privileged access management, were also popular ZTS policies. User behaviour analytics were less widely adopted.
“An increase in remote work is a big factor. It’s driving up demand for zero-trust solutions. With many companies making remote work a permanent structure, we expect zero trust adoption to continue to grow,” said Greg Bryan, senior manager at TeleGeography. “Cloud adoption and local internet breakouts have also been long-standing drivers of zero trust, in addition to SD-WAN.”
Adoption strategies
The survey also reveals the top security vendors that WAN managers use to secure their networks. One in three respondents is staying agile by using a mix of security vendors for their network security sourcing strategy. Palo Alto, Cisco, and Fortinet led the charge as the most used security vendors for hardware-based internet security.
The good news according to Bryan is that with growing adoption comes a narrowing of the knowledge gap. Just 8% of respondents were unfamiliar with zero trust in 2021, compared to one in five in 2019.
“We also see fewer respondents who either had not started or were just beginning their implementation journey when asked about their deployment pipeline. Without a doubt, zero trust has not just progressed in awareness, but in adoption,” he concluded.
